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Gold9472
10-26-2005, 06:34 PM
President Sends Right Message to Youth at Emma E. Booker Elementary

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2001/sarasotaheraldtribune091201b.html

by Tom Lyons
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune
September 12, 2001

When a wave of then-unfolding, well-coordinated terrorist assaults commandeered his attention in Sarasota on Tuesday morning, President George W. Bush made a quick decision.

He could and arguably should have left Emma E. Booker Elementary School immediately, gotten onto Air Force One and left Sarasota without a moment's delay.

He could have forgotten all about a school media center full of elementary school kids and teachers waiting to see him.

But he didn't.

The president walked into that crowded room, which was decorated with Cat in the Hat books and children's artwork, where he had planned to talk about literacy.

His words were brief and calm. The adults in the room, including various local elected officials and lots of news media people, had just heard about two planes crashing into the World Trade Center. But the young children had little or no idea that anything was going on that could possibly be bigger news than a visit from the president of the United States to their school.

That president said just a few words about the assaults, explained that others would talk about the new literacy efforts, and told the children he had to leave to take care of some important business.

It was the right kind of understatement.

There is no denying that the spectacular scale of the attacks, of the mass murder and the destruction of such an icon as the World Trade Center, is horrific. It is shocking despite the way we have been prepared for such possibilities for decades, by both real terrorist attacks and by novels and movie scripts. And it may not be over.

But I'd like to hear more of that understatement.

Five years ago, when a single pipe bomb exploded outdoors at Centennial Olympic Park, killing a woman and causing several injuries, some of the national reaction bothered me.

Well-intentioned politicians and news reporters felt compelled then to use words that showed how seriously we take such evil acts, and in the process they sent the wrong message, I wrote at the time. Elected officials talked about not surrendering to terrorism. An Associated Press story said a presidential address was meant "to soothe a jittery nation."

But this nation is huge, and far too strong to take a pipe bomb assault as remotely worthy of that kind of reaction, I said then.

It was ridiculous, and wrong, to talk about not surrendering to terrorism, as if such a thought was on anyone's mind.

We ought not give any pathetic bomber the false idea that we suddenly had to buck up to face life just because he had done something evil and cruel and pointless.

That's all the more true now. Yes, the destruction and death are on a scale we hoped would never take place in this country, but we always knew it could and probably would happen one day.

But no matter how many they kill or what they destroy, terrorists can't succeed if, in the face of their best effort, we simply refuse to be terrorized.

We should not be closing workplaces and schools and malls in states far from the destruction, or otherwise making a show of going overboard about security where there is no obvious threat.

If we do, we tell ourselves that we have reason to fear, and we turn ourselves into a jittery nation imprisoned by worry.

And the terrorists win.

That is not a message I want to be a part of. We have never been that kind of nation.

The president had the message right at Booker Elementary: We have important business to take care of.

Copyright 2001 Sarasota Herald-Tribune Co.