Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Thursday, Oct. 23, 2003 - 11:27 p.m.

There's a piece of email making the rounds again, called "Ode to America". Written by Romanian newspaperman Cornel Nistorescu, it was first rabidly floated about shortly after Sept. 11 and is a very nice, complimentary piece on Americans and how we're such great people, sticking together thru adversity, sharing the love, etc., all because we live in a free country. It ends thusly:

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 risk of sounding like commonplaces. I thought things over, but I reached only one conclusion.

Only freedom can work such miracles!

With all due respect, I beg to differ with Mr. Nistorescu. It's a nice thought, but when you get right down to it, freedom has nothing to do with it, self-congratulatory and Punky Brewster as it is. I submit this:

You don't need to be free to behave like a human being; God imbued us all with compassion and humanity, regardless of the country and political situation of our births. What you need is to have a free heart.

It is too bad that in the months - and now, years - following September 11, this country has since filled its heart with so much intolerant hate and the antithesis of God's word, squandering its goodwill and the compassion of others who reached out to us when disaster struck. We stood on the verge of a brave, new world and had the chance to do something bigger than America, bigger than our government, big enough to be worthy of the flag we wave so stridently every day, and we wasted it, mired down in the rhetoric and self-serving aggrandizement of a Bible-thumping President who wouldn't know a miracle from his asshole if it leapt up and slapped his dumb ass.

Thank you for your generosity, Mr. Nistorescu. I appreciate it. For a short time, I hope we deserved it and that we will again. But in the meantime, I wish the freedom that followed September 11 had lasted just a little bit longer.

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