It would be absurdly self-important of me to say that this dreadful business touches me personally. I wasn't there, I'm not an American, none of my friends or relations was hurt. I don't want to misappropriate the grief and outrage that is the rightful property of others.
But I do feel strongly about this, in all kinds of different ways. I lived in NY for a year in the early 90s, and I love that town in all its flawed glory, not with a sentimental love but with a love born of hundreds of mornings on the Lexington line, and watching big-hearted loudmouths directing the traffic out of the way of an ambulance, and the nice lady who sells you bagels at Zabar's, and... just the scale of it all. New York is distilled essence of human life. Although my Manhattanite friends are long gone to the suburbs or overseas now, for New York, the people and the place, yes I do feel for New York.
But the main thing I wanted to say was. Something about America.
You see, the thing is, the evil men who killed all those people and destroyed those lovely buildings, to do that they had to
steal airplanes. They couldn't make them. And they had to learn to fly those airplanes in America. America is and always has been and always will be a place where you make things and you do things. You put in more than you take out. You're a big country. But the people who attacked you are, as all evil things, essentially empty and derivative.
Of course, a lot of people hate America for its strength. Shame and envy can breed a lot of misplaced anger. To somebody whose life is blighted by circumstances beyond his control, it can be a great relief to pin the blame on a country that's so obviously fruitful. If you can't make your own garden grow, sometimes it makes you feel better to go out at night and trash the biggest orchard in the village.
In a way that's a thing that makes me so angry about this: that people who create should be hurt and killed by people who only know how to destroy. But it also makes me hopeful. They played the US national anthem on the radio here (live from Buckingham Palace, which I know some people find surreal, but you may be sure it was a very genuine gesture) and I found myself singing along. The words are so familiar that they can feel hackneyed; one sometimes wonders if they aren't just a cliché. But not after today.
Because, when it comes right down to it, that song is a question, and it's a question with an answer, and the answer is "yes, the Star Spangled Banner
does still wave over the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave". Just because you've heard the words over and again, they're still true; and they're true of America, in ways they are
not true of many another nation. It's scant consolation to those who are bereaved or injured at the moment, but it's important nonetheless for Americans to remember that they are a great people, and that they are loved and admired.
§
George Sherston
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