THE AMERICAN spirit is alive and well even in the scattered mound of rubble that was once Moore, Okla., before a two-mile-wide tornado leveled most of it. You can tell that spirit is still strong because of the American flags that have sprouted everywhere in that stricken little town.
That same unconquerable spirit triumphed after the Twin Towers collapsed September 11, 2001, in what wasn’t a natural disaster at all, but man made. Well, maybe with a little help from the nether regions. For as The Book says, He is always going to and fro in land, up and down in it, seeing what death and destruction can be sown, and how many souls He can get to do His awful work. Only to be confronted by a mysterious goodness that refuses to die, but rises up even after the most searing blow: the loss of our children.
It was a terrible day in Moore, Okla., but next morning our flag was still there.
At such times, the flag seems to rise almost on itself, whether over the remains of a little town in Oklahoma or high atop a mountain of wreckage in lower Manhattan.
At such times the flag isn’t so much a symbol as a felt presence, a force in itself, needing no words to make our hearts beat faster. Seeing it, we hold our heads a little higher. And we are strengthened. No matter what may come.
How explain it? Why try? It is enough to see the American spirit in action. That spirit can be seen, it can heard and felt in Americans like Debbie Guidry and her husband Robert, who live in that devastated but not defeated little town in Oklahoma. And plan to keep living there. They say they’ll rebuild the now flattened house they’ve lived in for 31 years right where it stood. Why not? The ground has already been cleared.
“It was a nice neighborhood,” Mrs. Guidry explained. “Several of us have lived in this neighborhood for over 30 years-so we’ve grown up and grown old together.”
Even as she noted what all had been lost, Mrs, Guidry noted that it “was just stuff, and we probably had too much stuff anyway.”
Not far away, Sonia Stewart was helping some of her kin move whatever possessions they still had out of their wrecked house. She pointed out that it was a lot easier to get into the attic now that the roof had been pretty much blown away.
What’s more, as she told a reporter, “We still have each other.”
The lady clearly knows what’s important. As for what had been lost, “these things are replaceable.” Family isn’t.
The tallest of trees can be toppled by the whirlwind, but its roots still go deep. Like the American spirit.
Editorial, Pages 18 on 05/25/2013