Some Bright Morning
By Tony Cook
As this issue was going to press, we found our lives disrupted and forever changed by the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. While we grouped around a radio in the office that morning, listening to the horrifying details, my thoughts went back to another day of tragedy.
On January 28, 1986, I was working in the editorial office of The Historian at the University of Toledo when we learned that the space shuttle, Challenger, had exploded during take-off. The pictures on television showed it breaking apart in a beautifully clear, blue sky.
For the rest of that day and a long while after, the world seemed tilted in a new direction. Everything, everybody, appeared the same. But people were not the same. We were all experiencing grief, which dims every other emotion.
On September 11, I felt again the chill that news of a national calamity sends through us all. It is the same kind of shock one feels when a family member or close friend dies. Except that, instead of dimming only your own sensations of normal life, it dims everybody's.
How optimistically so many of us, myself included, welcomed the arrival of the year 2001. A new millennium was upon us, and I remember reading and hearing time and again the phrase "dawn of a new millennium." This new year heralded a new era of enlightenment, we believed. Instead, 2001 will be recorded in history as a year of death and violence. The world enters the third millennium the same way it entered the first and second: in confusion and conflict.
Speaking with my mother about President Bush's declaration of war against terrorism, which was being compared to America's declaration of war against Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack, she told me that, for her, the World War II era revolved around a single emotion: fear. Everyone believed America was doing the right thing, she said. But two of her brothers went to Europe with the Army after D-Day, and she feared they might never come home alive. Thankfully, they did.
As I consider the prospect of another war, I think of the people on all sides who will die. I remember attending a community memorial service for a boy from my hometown who was killed in Vietnam. It was late summer, 1968—not long after Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. We gathered in the school gym, sang patriotic songs and hymns, then went out into the sunlight to resume our lives.
Indeed, 2001 will join the years 1941, 1968, 1986, and many others in world history as a year of tragedy. It will always be my personal year of tragedy, also. On March 23, my father, a retired police chief and a World War II Navy veteran, passed away. Like many others, he died of heart disease, assisted in its crippling power by Parkinson's.
When we gathered for Dad's funeral, a friend played guitar and sang an old gospel song, "I'll Fly Away." Some bright morning, when this life is o'er, I'll fly away. To a place on God's celestial shore, I'll fly away. I'll fly away, oh glory, I'll fly away. When I die, hallelujah by and by, I'll fly away.
They have all flown away: the victims of September 11, the Challenger crew, King and Kennedy, the young soldier from home, my uncles, my father. Before leaving us, each made a difference in the lives of others. What can we do, those of us still living, to make a difference before we, too, shall fly away?
As for me, I will follow my father's example: Cherish life. Love your neighbor. Seek justice. Work for peace.
T.S.C.