An Ode to America by a Romanian newspaper editor

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Emma Lazarus penned these immortal words after visiting the Continent and witnessing, first-hand, the victims of 19th-century persecution. (Emma never knew of her poetic legacy, for she died of cancer in 1887 when she was only 38 — a year before the Statue of Liberty was installed in New York Harbor, and 15 years before her poem was inscribed and placed inside it.) Today, the persecution still exists. We call it terrorism, and its victims belong to no single race or creed. Today, our land no longer contains the vast, welcoming spaces that inspired Emma's poem. And today, terrorism itself has finally found its way to our shores. So we want you to hear, beloved friends everywhere, these more recent words, written by an unknown Romanian newspaper editor, that we all may take heart from them in the times to come. For we are all brothers and sisters, now, and the golden door leads to the whole of our earthly home. It is time for all of us to lift our lamps beside that door. —Spirit of Ma'at staff Why are Americans so united? They don't resemble one another, even if you paint them! They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations. Some of them are nearly extinct, others are incompatible with one another, and in matters of religious beliefs, not even God can count how many there are. Still, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into one hand placed over one heart. Nobody rushed to say that the White House, the army, or the secret services were nothing but a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed onto the nearby streets to look around and gape. Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised the flag on the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps, and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a minister or the president were passing. On every occasion they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!" Silent as a rock, I watched the charity concert broadcast on Saturday — once, twice, three times, on different TV channels. There were Clint Eastwood, Willie Nelson, Robert de Niro, Julia Roberts, Cassius Clay, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Sylvester Stallone, James Wood, and many others, more than any film or producer could ever bring together. The American's solidarity of spirit turned them into a choir. Actually, choir is not the word. What you could hear was the heavy artillery of the American Soul. What neither George W. Bush, nor Bill Clinton, nor Colin Powell could say without facing the risk of stumbling over words and sounds, was being heard in a great and unmistakable way in this charity concert. I don't know how it happened that all this obsessive singing of America didn't sound croaky, nationalist, or ostentatious. It made you green with envy, because you weren't able to sing for your own country without running the risk of being considered chauvinistic or ridiculous, or suspected of who-knows-what covert motives. I watched the live broadcast and the rerun of its rerun for hours, listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair, not even knowing who she was . . . or of the California hockey player who fought with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that would have killed other hundreds or thousands of people. How on earth would these people ever bow before a fellow human being? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of a few tragic heroes became a modern myth. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit which nothing can buy. What on earth can unite the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their galloping history? Their economic power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases which risked sounding like cliches. I thought things over. And I reached only one conclusion. Only freedom can work such miracles.