Tears. Beautiful. Needed. Grateful. - Molly
America may seem leaderless, with nastiness and bullying
ascendant, but the best of our nation materialized during a moral crisis on a
commuter train in Portland, Ore.
The three were as different as could be. One was a 23-year-old
recent Reed College graduate who had a mane of long hair and was working as a
consultant. Another was a 53-year-old Army veteran with the trimmest of
haircuts and a record of service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The third was a
21-year-old poet and Portland State University student on his way to a job at a
pizzeria. What united the three was decency.
When they intervened, the man harassing the girls pulled a knife
and slashed the three men before fleeing. Rick Best, the veteran, died at the
scene. Taliesin Namkai-Meche, the recent Reed graduate, was conscious as he
waited for an ambulance. A good Samaritan took off her shirt to cover him; she recounted that some of his last words were: “I
want everybody on the train to know, I love them.” He died soon after arriving
at the hospital.
Another passer-by stanched the bleeding of the student poet,
Micah Fletcher, and called his mother to tell her to go to the hospital — but
played down the injuries to avoid terrifying her. Fletcher underwent two hours
of surgery to remove bone fragments from his throat and is recovering.
Police arrested
Jeremy Christian, 35, a white supremacist, and charged him with the murders.
The train attack doesn’t fit America’s internal narrative of terrorism, but
it’s a reminder that terrorism takes many forms. Last year Americans were less
likely to be killed by a Muslim terrorist (odds of one in six million) than for
being Muslim (odds of one in one million), according to Charles Kurzman of the
University of North Carolina. In tragedy, we can sometimes find inspiration. In that train car, we saw that courage and leadership are alive — if not always in Washington, then among ordinary Americans converging from varied backgrounds on a commuter train, standing together against a threat to our shared humanity.
I’d been dispirited by recent events. President Trump’s overseas
trip marked an abdication of American leadership, with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel concluding that Europe can no longer rely on the
United States. The Trump budget was intellectually dishonest and morally
repugnant, with cuts in global AIDS funding alone that may cost one million lives.
Today’s White House
seems to stand for nothing loftier than crony capitalism and the scapegoating
of refugees, Muslims and immigrants. To me, Trump “values” are primarily
narcissism, nepotism and nihilism.
Please continue
this article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/opinion/portland-train-attack-muslim.html
No comments:
Post a Comment