<< Back 9/18/02 Leadership is much more than a mighty military By Dawn Gilchrist-Young When my father-in-law took me up for a flight in his Steerman, an open cockpit World War II training plane, I felt I was experiencing one of the few tangible equivalents that freedom might have. We flew neither long nor far, and he did none of the tricks with me that I had watched him do with his son and my husband — no flying upside down, nor climbing vertically until the engine all but died, then throttling until the engine again caught as the wings tipped toward the earth. This was not the first time I had flown in a small airplane, but it was the first time I had flown in one in which there was nothing at all between the wind and me. My father in law is a kind man, aware of my susceptibility to motion sickness, and, most importantly, had heard the story of my being sick all over the interior of the first small plane in which I had flown when I was 16. (I was not only sick all over the plane, I also tossed my proverbial cookies all over my instructor, just as he was pulling us out of a perfect loop.) The unfortunate pilot who taught my first flying lesson was Ogden Brower, a man who had flown as a fighter for the Royal Canadian Air Force in the same war that produced the Steerman, and who, in his later years, taught flying out of a small airport in Andrews, North Carolina. My father had arranged the lessons for any one of his children who was willing, trading for them his own labor as a mason. I was the only child both old enough and willing, and so I had entered into what might have been a life-changing venture had I completed what my father dreamed of for others because he wouldn’t allow the luxury for himself. But I continued to grow sick each time I flew, and because of this the lessons were always something to dread. So just before my instructor deemed me ready for solo flight, I quit the lessons. I have never regretted quitting, because I am fond of neither machinery nor speed, enjoying going fast on a machine only if it is a bicycle. And even though I love the stories of adventurers such as Beryl Markham and Amelia Earhart, and the images of flying from “Out of Africa” and “The English Patient,” I do not even enjoy driving a car, and have far more in common with the 19th century British romantics who went on walking tours of rolling hills than with the brave and hale women and men who flew planes against all expectations. Still, the smell of airplane fuel, the controls in a small cockpit, the chill of metal against my hands on a cool morning — all of these move me — in part because I associate with them the memory of doing something that pleased my father, in part because I associate with small airplanes the kind of courageous acts that have become defining moments in American history — from the Wright Brothers through the Lindbergh flight through Amelia Earhart and on into the squadrons that flew bombing runs in World War II. However, I also know that I am moved because of a sentimentalized belief in an innocence and goodness that are the result of my American nationality, education, and upbringing. But the pride I have in my nationality has as its basis America’s more altruistic involvement with other countries, such as Woodrow Wilson’s advocacy of the League of Nations, or America’s Marshall Plan (not entirely altruistic, but close enough), or the United Nations making Manhattan its home. When I think of America’s past in this way, I see the biggest difference in World War II and our threatened attack of Iraq as being that of patriotism as opposed to nationalism. Our military opposition of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan was not just in protection of America’s interests (although the inhabitants of concentration camps might say we waited too long). We were one nation among equals, all of whom had a common goal. In our pursuit of Iraq’s demise through preemptive strikes by our military, however, America stands very much alone and with our own interests very much at the forefront. And the more I watch the world watching us, the less I enjoy the view. I much prefer the view from the front cockpit of a Steerman, with the sky spread before you, and the romance of World War II flyers behind you. But even then, in that second war to end all wars, we weren’t an innocent nation. We had been sowing the seeds and reaping the benefits of “Manifest Destiny” for some time, and the Manhattan Project was well under way in Los Alamos when Steermans were still being produced. Over a hundred years before, in 1776, the framers of the Declaration had slave owners among them, and while we declared independence from Great Britain in order to reclaim the rights we believed the Magna Charta had granted us, we also exhibited a blithe unconcern for the rights of the indigenous people whose lives we were destroying. Moreover, in 1787, as an American Constitution was being drafted in a hot Philadelphia, very little had changed. These were great men, but they were also men of their time. The knowledge of their contradictions does make me see these men as human, but that same knowledge does not decrease the power of the documents’ potential, although that potential has never been fully realized. Notwithstanding the complexity of these facts, climbing into a 1943 biplane with U.S. Navy on its wings has a simplifying effect: it reminds me that the rhetoric of statesmen and politicians amounts to nothing unless it is enforced by soldiers, such as the boys who trained in these planes. Last Wednesday was Sept. 11, a terrible anniversary, and too much has already been said about America’s loss of innocence after our own passenger airplanes were used as bombs against American targets. However, the people who died and their families who live on were and are among the innocent. And if innocence is defined as a lack of self consciousness or guile, or as a general state of naiveté and lack of awareness, then yes, America, as a nation that pays more attention to national than international news, may be innocent, though it is innocence borne of willful blindness. Further, while nothing can make me believe that the destruction of last September was visited on those who deserved it, I cannot help but know that, if innocence is defined as blameless or harmless in effect, then America, as a nation, was not innocent on Sept. 11, 2001, nor even on the date to which Sept. 11 has been inaccurately compared — Dec. 7, 1941. Our shortsighted foreign policies (censuring Russia for opening up trade with North Korea), our unconscionable domestic consumption and corporate greed (need I mention names?), our self-centered protection of American economic interests abroad without regard to Third World sufferings (NAFTA), or environmental ramifications (withdrawal from the Kyoto Accords), and our general unwillingness to change any of our policies have made us appear as anything but innocent to those who are most affected by our actions. In a special section of Christian Science Monitor this week, titled “Is America The Good Guy?,” people in 16 countries were interviewed, and the most common answer was that America is not seen as the good guy, and, in many cases, is seen as a rogue nation that goes its own way simply because it has the might to do so. My brothers and father, all of whom served as American soldiers, remind me that everyone who wants a better life desires to become American. My brother’s fiancée, an educated woman from a Third World country, responds to this that it is because everyone wants to have what they believe the typical American has — the promised chicken in every pot, the car in every garage, the access to a free public education — not because they think all American actions are the result of good and moral policies. And a friend reminds me that not everyone wants to come to America — because many European countries have achieved a degree of civilization that is far more civil and comprehensive than what we have achieved here, though certainly not without their own problems. Since I don’t have television, national and international news comes to me from radio and newspapers, and so my exposure to the infamous images of that day has been limited to only a few, and I find those unbearable. They are unbearable because I am a patriot, and the World Trade Center buildings held for me the same symbolism they held for much of the world — they were a symbol of America’s work ethic, of our openness to immigrants, and of our prosperity, uneven as it is. Because I believe in the definition of patriotism, “a love for and devotion to one’s country,” I am concerned with how the rest of the world sees my country as a whole. Because I believe in the ideas of the Constitution, ideas that I still find remarkable and stirring, I think Americans must reconsider the way we live, especially the way we disregard the needs and wants of the rest of the planet. In disregarding the global concern with climate change, in disregarding the global concern with arms shipments (unless it negatively affects us), in disregarding the global concern with the future ramifications of an American attack on Iraq, we have ceased to be a nation of patriots and have instead become a nation of nationalists, a word Webster’s defines as “a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.” Because I am a patriot, because I wanted to feel with my countrymen last Wednesday, I tried to set aside my skeptical disposition and resistance to being told the appropriate sentiment one should be experiencing, and so I attempted to objectively view the overwhelming number of commemorative events on Sept. 11. To a limited extent, I was successful. For example, I was genuinely moved by the respectful silence of the entire student body at Swain County High School as we filed into the Fine Arts Center for our own memorial service. I was moved by students again when a classroom of unruly ninth-graders applauded a new teacher for her organization of the event. I was moved by Terri Gross’ public and only slightly self-conscious concern on “Fresh Air” that the American media might be overdoing the hype just a bit. And at the end of a long day, I was moved by the versions of “America the Beautiful” and “The Star Spangled Banner” that I heard from different parts of the country as I drove home from a run on WCU’s cross-country trail. But I was also worried. I was worried that the extreme emotions of the Sept. 11 anniversary might be used by the present administration to get more backing for its desired war on Iraq. I was worried that Americans would forget that this war on terror began as a demand that a troubled Third World country should release to us the man thought to be responsible for American deaths, but that it has become something else altogether. Our war on terror, as our present administration wisely calls it, has become an ultimatum demanding that the entire planet view our every action as justifiable, and as an integral part of a war between good and evil, with American military power always being on the side of the good. The opposite effect, however, is what has been accomplished. To much of the world, America now appears as a country that embodies the adage, “Might makes right,” much as Rome must have once appeared to the non-citizens of its empire. But that isn’t how I want to think of this country that has made me who I am. I’d rather see us as progressing more and more towards what the framers of the Constitution somehow envisioned, what the soldiers in every war from the American Revolution through the Gulf War and our recent bombing of Afghanistan must have believed they were promoting — liberty, equality, and whatever one calls happiness. Instead of remembering the looks on the faces of disbelieving and terrified New Yorkers who watched as buildings disintegrated in heat and boiling dust, I’d rather imagine the look on my father-in-law’s face as he rumbled down the runway for the first time in his restored Steerman. I think he must have worn a look of pleasure, of intense focus, and maybe of the pride of ownership. I’d rather remember that humans are capable of a literal transcendence, and that Americans as a people have often risen above difficult circumstances, including circumstances involving our own culpability. I’d rather remember what everyone knows — that in the economy of human dreams, flight is still the ultimate freedom. (Dawn Gilchrist-Young teaches in Swain County and lives in Cullowhee. She can be reached at youngericyoung@cs.com)