A Must Read Speech by Bill Moyers "BuzzFlash.com" wrote: Following is the Keynote Address by Bill Moyers at the Environmental Grantmakers Association conference, Brainerd, MN October 16, 2001 Brought to you courtesy of BuzzFlash.com This isn't the speech I expected to give today. I intended something else. For the last several years I've been taking every possible opportunity to talk about the soul of democracy. Something is deeply wrong with politics today, I told anyone who would listen. And I wasn't referring to the partisan mudslinging,or the negative TV ads, the excessive polling, or the empty campaigns. I was talking about something deeper, something troubling at the core of politics. The soul of democracy the essence of the word itself, is government of, by, and for the people. And the soul of democracy has been dying, drowning in a rising tide of big money contributed by a narrow, unrepresentative elite that has betrayed the faith of citizens in self-government. This wasn't something I came to casually, by the way. It's the speech I was working on six weeks ago. But I'm not the same man I was six weeks ago. And you're not the same audience for whom I was preparing those remarks. We've all been changed by what happened on September 11th. My friend, Thomas Hearne, the president of Wake Forest University, reminded me recently that while the clock and the calendar make it seem as if our lives unfold hour by hour, day by day, our passage is marked by events of celebration and crisis. We share those in common. They create the memories which make of us a history, and make of us a people, a nation. Pearl Harbor was that event for my parents' generation. It changed their world, and it changed them. They never forgot the moment when the news reached them. For my generation it was the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the dogs and fire hose in Alabama. Those events broke our hearts. We healed, but scars remain. For this generation, that moment will be September 11th, 2001 -- the worst act of terrorism in our nation's history. It has changed the country. It has changed us. Thatt want to own our land, wealth, monuments, buildings, fields, or streams. They're not after tangible property. Sure, they aim to annihilate the targets they strike. But their real goal is to get inside our heads, our psyche, and to deprive us -- the survivors -- of peace of mind, of trust, of faith; they aim to prevent us from believing again in a world of mercy, justice, and love, or working to bring that better world to pass. This is their real target, to turn our imaginations into Afghanistans, where they can rule by fear. Once they possess us, they are hard to exorcise. This summer our daughter and son-in-law adopted a baby boy. On September 11th our son-in-law passed through the shadow of the World Trade Center to his office up the block. He got there in time to see the eruption of fire and smoke. He saw the falling bodies. He saw the people jumping to their deaths. His building was evacuated and for long awful moments he couldn't reach his wife, our daughter, to say he was okay. She was in agony until he finally got through, and even then he couldn't get home to his family until the next morning. It took him several days fully to get his legs back. Now, in a matter-of-fact voice, our daughter tells us how she often lies awake at night, wondering where and when it might happen again, going to the computer at three in the morning, her baby asleep in the next room, to check out what she can about bioterrorism, germ warfare, anthrax, and the vulnerability of children. Beyond the carnage left by the sneak attack, terrorists create another kind of havoc, invading and despoiling a new mother's deepest space, holding her imagination hostage to the most dreadful possibilities. None of us is spared. The building where my wife and I produce our television programs is in midtown Manhattan, just over a mile from ground zero. It was evacuated immediately after the disaster although the two of us remained with other colleagues to help keep the station on the air. Our building was evacuated again late in the evening a day later because of a bomb scare at the Empire State building nearby. We had just ended a live broadcast for PBS when the security officers swept through and ordered everyone out of the building. As we were making our way down the stairs, I took Judith's arm and was suddenly struck by the thought: is this the last time I'll touch her? Could our marriage of almost fifty years end here, on this dim and bare staircase? I ejected the thought forcibly from my mind, like a bouncer removing a rude intruder; I shoved it out of my consciousness by sheer force of will. But in the first hours of morning, it crept back. Returning from Washington on the train last week, I looked up and for the first time in days saw a plane in the sky. And then another, and another -- not nearly as many as I used to on that same journey. But so help me, every plane I saw, and every plane I see today, invokes unwelcome images and terrifying thoughts. Unwelcome images, terrifying thoughts: time bombs planted in our heads by terrorists, our own private Afghanistans. I wish I could find the wisdom in this. Then our time together this morning might have been more profitable for you. But wisdom is a very elusive thing. Someone told me once that we often have the experience but miss the wisdom. Wisdom comes, if at all, slowly, painfully, and only after deep reflection. Perhaps when we gather next year the wisdom will have arranged itself like the beautiful colors of a stilled kaleidoscope, and we will look back on September 11th and see it differently. But I haven't been ready for reflection. I have wanted to stay busy, on the go, or on the run, perhaps, from the need to cope with the reality that just a few subway stops south of where I get off at Penn Station in midtown Manhattan, five thousand people died in a matter of minutes. One minute they're pulling off their jackets, shaking Sweet 'n Low into their coffee, adjusting the picture of a child or sweetheart or spouse in a frame on their desk, booting up their computer, and in the next, it's all over for them. I've been collecting obituaries of the victims. Practically every day the New York Times runs compelling little profiles of the dead and missing, and I've been keeping them. Not out of some macabre desire to stare at death, but to see if I might recognize a face, a name, some old acquaintance, a former colleague, even a stranger I might have seen occasionally on the subway or street. That was my original purpose. But as the file has grown, I realize what an amazing montage it is of life, an unforgettable portrait of the America those terrorists wanted to shatter. I study each little story for its contribution to the mosaic of my country, its particular revelation about the nature of democracy, the people with whom we share it. Luis Bautista was one. It was his birthday, and he had the day off from Windows on the World, the restaurant high atop the World Trade Center. But back home in Peru his family depended on Luis for the money he had been sending them since he arrived in New York two years ago speaking only Spanish, and there was the tuition he would soon be paying to study at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. So on the eleventh of September Luis Bautista was putting in overtime. He was 24. William Steckman was 56. For thirty five of those years he took care of NBC's transmitter at One World Trade Center, working the night shift because it let him spend time during the day with his five children and to fix things up around the house. His shift ended at six a.m., but this morning his boss asked him to stay on to help install some new equipment, and William Steckman said sure. Elizabeth Holmes lived in Harlem with her son and jogged every morning around Central Park where I often go walking, and I have been wondering if Elizabeth Holmes and I perhaps crossed paths some morning. I figure we were kindred souls. She too, was a Baptist, and sang in the choir at the Canaan Baptist church. She was expecting a ring from her fiance at Christmas. Linda Luzzicone and Ralph Gerhardt were planning their wedding, too. They had both sets of parents come to New York in August to meet for the first time and talk about the plans. They had discovered each other in nearby cubicles on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center and fell in love. They were working there when the terrorists struck. Mon Jahn-bul-lie came here from Albania. Because his name was hard to pronounce his friends called him by the Cajun 'Jambalay' and he grew to like it. He lived with his three sons in the Bronx and was supposed to have retired when he turned 65 last year, but he was so attached to the building and so enjoyed the company of the other janitors that he often showed up an hour before work just to shoot the bull. In my mind's eye, I can see him that morning, horsing around with his buddies. Fred Scheffold liked his job, too, Chief of the 12th battalion in Harlem. He loved going into fires and he loved his men. But he never told his daughters in the suburbs about the bad stuff in all the fires he had fought over the years. He didn't want to worry them. This morning, his shift had just ended and he was starting home when the alarm rang. He jumped into the truck with the others and at One World Trade Center he pushed through the crowds to the staircase heading for the top. The last time anyone saw him alive he was he ading for the top. While hundreds poured past him going down through the flames and smoke, Fred Scheffold just kept going up. Now you know why I can't give the speech I was working on. Talking about my work in television would be too parochial. And what's happened since the attacks would seem to put the lie to my fears about the soul of democracy. Americans have rallied together in a way that I cannot remember since World War Two. In real and instinctive ways we have felt touched / singed -- by the fires that brought down those buildings, even those of us who did not directly lose a loved one. Great and low alike, we have been humbled by a renewed sense of our common mortality. Those planes the terrorists turned into suicide bombers cut through a complete cross-section of America: stockbrokers and dishwashers, bankers and secretaries, lawyers and janitors, Hollywood producers and new immigrants, urbanites and suburbanites alike. One community near where I live in New Jersey lost twenty-three residents. A single church near our home lost eleven members of the congregation. Eighty nations are represented among the dead. This catastrophe has reminded us of a basic truth at the heart of our democracy: no matter our wealth or status or faith, we are all equal before the law, in the voting booth, and when death rains down from the sky. We have also been reminded that despite years of scandals and political corruption, despite the stream of stories of personal greed and pirates in Gucci's scamming the treasury, despite the retreat from the public sphere and the turn toward private privilege, despite squalor for the poor and gated communities for the rich, we have been reminded that the great mass of Americans have not yet given up on the idea of "We, the People." And they have refused to accept the notion, promoted so diligently by our friends at the Heritage Foundation and by Grover Norquist and his right-wing ilk, that government, the public service, should be shrunk to a size where they can drown it in the bathtub (that's what Norquist said is their goal). These right-wingers at Heritage and elsewhere, by the way, earlier this year teamed up with the deep-pocket bankers who finance them, to stop the United States from cracking down on terrorist money havens. As TIME Magazine reports, thirty industrial nations were ready to tighten the screws on offshore financial centers whose banks have the potential to hide and often help launder billions of dollars for drug cartels, global crime syndicates, and groups like Osama bin Ladens national security is to fight to reduce our nation's dependence on oil, whether imported or domestic. But don't stop there. Before the 11th of September the nuclear power industry was salivating at the prospect of the government giving it limited liability for the risks of the meltdown or other nuclear accident. We were told by Vice President Cheney that nuclear power was a "safe technology" that could help alleviate energy shortages and not contribute to greenhouse gases. But when Dick Cheney invited the energy companies and their lobbyists to write his energy plan, he didn't reckon on terrorism or the advice of Harvey Wassermann. Harvey Wassermann has spent years studying these issues and writing about America's experience with atomic radiation. He tells us that one or both planes that crashed into the World Trade Center could easily have obliterated the two atomic reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson River. Regulations put out by the nuclear regulatory commission regarding plant safety don't address that sort of event, and neither plant was designed to withstand such crashes. Until now Harvey Wassermann's scenario was unthinkable. Had one or both of those jets hit one or both of the operating reactors at Indian Point, the ensuing cloud of radiation would have dwarfed the ones at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. At the very least, the massive impact and hellish jet fuel fire would destroy the human ability to control the plants' functions. Vital cooling systems, back-up power generators, and communications networks would crumble. The assault would not require a large jet. The safety systems are extremely complex and virtually indefensible. One or more could be wiped out with a wide range of easily deployed small aircraft, ground-based weapons, truck bombs, or even chemical/biological assaults aimed at the operating work force. Dozens of U.S. reactors have repeatedly failed even modest security tests over the years. And even heightened wartime standards cannot guarantee protection of the vast, supremely sensitive controls required for reactor safety. Without continuous monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of radioactive roads in the cores and the thousands more stored in those fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately, the Hudson. Striking water, they would blast gigantic billows of horribly radioactive steam into the atmosphere. The radioactive clouds would then enshroud New York, New Jersey, New England, and carry deep into the Atlantic and up into Canada and across to Europe and around the globe again and again. The immediate damage would render thousands of the world's most populous and expensive square miles permanently uninhabitable. All five boroughs of New York City would be an apocalyptic wasteland. All real estate and economic value would be poisonously radioactive throughout the entire region. Who knows how many people would die? As at Three Mile Island, where thousands of farm and wild animals died in heaps, and as at Chernobyl, where soil, water and plant life have been hopelessly irradiated, natural ecosystems on which human and all other life depends would be permanently and irrevocably destroyed; spiritually, psychologically, financially, ecologically, our nation would never recover. This is what we missed by a mere forty miles near New York City on September 11th. And remember, there are 103 of these potential bombs of the apocalypse now operating in the United States. 103. I know you see the magnitude of the challenge. I know you see what we're up against. I know you get it, the work that we must do. It's why you mustn't lose heart. Your adversaries will call you unpatriotic for speaking the truth when conformity reigns. Ideologues will smear you for challenging the official view of reality. Mainstream media will ignore you, and those gasbags on cable TV and the radio talk shows will ridicule and vilify you. But I urge you to hold to these words: "In the course of fighting the present fire, we must not abandon our efforts to create fire-resistant structures of the future." Those words were written by my friend Randy Kehler more than ten years ago, as America geared up to fight the Gulf War. They ring as true today. Those fire-resistant structures must include an electoral system that is no longer dominated by big money, where the voices and problems of average people are attended on a fair and equal basis. They must include an energy system that is more sustainable, and less dangerous. And they must include a media that takes its responsibility to inform us as seriously as its interest in entertaining us. My own personal response to Osama bin Laden is not grand, or rousing, or dramatic. All I know to do is to keep doing as best I can the craft that has been my calling now for most of my adult life. My colleagues and I have rededicated ourselves to the production of several environmental reports that were in progress before September 11th. As a result of our two specials this year, "Trade Secrets" and "Earth on Edge," PBS is asking all of public television's production teams to focus on the environment for two weeks around Earth Day next April. Our documentaries will anchor that endeavor. One will report on how an obscure provision in the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) can turn the rule of law upside down and undermine a community's health and environment. Our four-part series on America's First River looks at how the Hudson River shaped America's conservation movement a century ago and, more recently, the modern environmental movement. We're producing another documentary on the search for alternative energy sources, another on children and the environment the questions scientists, researchers and pediatricians are asking about children's vulnerability to hazards in the environment, and we are also making a stab at updating the health of the global environment that we launched last June with Earth on Edge. What does Osama bin Laden have to do with these? He has given me not one but five thousand and more reasons for journalism to signify on issues that matter. I began this talk with the names of some of them, the victims who died on the 11th of September. I did so because I never want to forget the humanity lost in the horror. I never want to forget the e-mail Forrester Church told me about, sent by a doomed employee in the World Trade Center who, just before his life was over, wrote: "Thank you for being such a great friend." I never want to forget the man and woman holding hands as they leap together to their death. I never want to forget those firemen who just kept going up; they just kept going up. And I never want to forget what Forrester said of this disaster, that the very worst of which human beings are capable can bring out the very best. I've learned a few things in my 67 years. One thing I've learned that the kingdom of the human heart is large. In addition to hate, it contains courage. In response to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, my parents' generation waged and won a great war, then came home to establish a more prosperous and just America. I inherited the benefits of their courage. So did you. The ordeal was great but prevail they did. We will, too, if we rise to the spiritual and moral challenge of survival. Michael Berenbaum has defined that challenge for me. As President of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, he worked with people who escaped the Holocaust: Here's what he says: "The question is what to do with the very fact of survival. Over time survivors will be able to answer that question not by a statement about the past but by what they do with the future. Because they have faced death, many will have learned what is more important: Life itself, love, family, community. The simple things we have all taken for granted will bear witness to that reality. The survivors will not be defined by the lives they have led until now but by the lives that they will lead from now on. For the experience of near death to have ultimate meaning, it must take shape in how one rebuilds from the ashes. Such for the individual; so, too, for the nation." We're survivors, you and I. We will be defined not by the lives we led until the 11th of September, but by the lives we will lead from now on. So go home, make the best grants you've ever made. And the biggest - we have too little time to pinch pennies. Back the committed and courageous people in the field, and back them with media to spread their message. Stick your own neck out. Let your work be charged with passion, and your life with a sense of mission. For when all is said and done, the most important grant you'll ever make is the gift of yourself, to the work at hand.