Helping Each Other Down the Stairs

Readers of the Wall Street Journal and other press-subscribing Republicans (mustn't take this for granted now that Joe the Plumber and Todd the Snowmobilist are the party's new standard bearers, replacing those disgraced investors) have long been familiar with Peggy Noonan, but I just made her acquaintance. I have to admit I never listened to the speeches she wrote for President Reagan. I didn't listen to any president's speeches back then. But lately, as I've struggled to understand what has become of the US and the global economy we've apparently driven into the ground, I've been paying attention to a lot of new voices. Right now, I'll accept wisdom from anyone, and I don't expect to find myself with a surfeit of it doing so!

Peggy Noonan has long written a column for the WSJ and recently she had a small new book published that for a week got a decent amount of attention. Patriotic Grace, it's titled, What It Is and Why We Need It Now. A plain-spoken, easily read book that is hardly bigger than a mass market paperback, it's her perspective on what we really need to be focusing on as Americans today, I mean, right after the banks get back to serving each other instead of us and oil prices start to bubble back up to unaffordable heights again. What is it Ms. Noonan would have us devote our best and brightest energies to addressing?

That old Republican gig: Armageddon. Yep. In one guise after another, whether it's a Rapture or Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Bomb in Iran or the Bomb in North Korea but heaven knows never the many bombs in our own arsenal, the right is always ranting about the last day, the ultimate destruction, the anthrax, the suitcase bomb, and oh yes the swine flu. I'm sorry, but I'm sick of hearing all this. Come what may, this is not what I will build my life around. I spent my grade school years covering my head with my skinny little arms, hiding in the coat racks of the elementary school corridors and under the little vinyl desks of the classroom, to save myself and my future progeny from the fallout of a nuclear bomb attack on America. I watched my neighbors dig an enormous hole in their backyard so they could survive the inevitable Russian attack. I am not going to live like that again, now that I'm an adult. It was strange enough to do so as a child.

Peggy Noonan's right about a lot of things, though; we will probably live to see another attack on us, probably on our own soil, probably every bit as horrible as the falling of the towers and the crashing of our innocent arrogance. And we are not prepared for it in terms of emergency procedures, and the Department of Homeland Security is a bumbling fool in a hall of mirrors. But she is wrong that this is what we should be concentrating on as a nation with one common purpose, one all-consuming patriotism. Forget the notion of building a sense of "Patriotic Grace" that will see us through a debilitating terrorist attack; let's start working instead on something altogether more encompassing: a sense of global grace. Let us start to work with other nations, and define ourselves and our mission not by how we respond to those who hate us but but how we respond to those who need us.

Noonan said her book was engendered at a moment when the Capitol rotunda was being abruptly and summarily evacuated because an errant plane had violated its protected airspace. In fleeing the building, she noticed an elderly woman in a wheelchair stranded atop the stairs until a pair of men picked her up, chair and all, and carried her down. In that, Ms. Noonan found such horror that she began to formulate this book, because "Before this is over, we'll all be helping each other down the stairs." But where Ms. Noonan finds that troublesome, I find it somehow comforting. As a Democrat, I readily confess that I've long had the hope that we will continue to find ways to take care of one another--perhaps to a Republican, that prospect is not as calming.