On Tuesday morning, they failed spectacularly to honour their end of the
bargain -- as I'm sure the terrorists knew they would. By all accounts,
they travelled widely during the long preparations for their mission, and
they must have seen that an airline cabin is the one place where, thanks to
the FAA, you can virtually guarantee you'll meet no resistance. Indeed, in
their FAA-mandated coerciveness the average coach-class cabin is the
nearest the Western world gets to the condition of those terrorists' home
states. We've all experienced those bad weather delays where you're stuck
on the runway behind 60 other planes waiting to take off and some guy says,
"Hey, we've been in here a couple of hours now. Any chance of a Diet
Coke?", and the stewardess says he'll have to wait, and the guy's cranky
enough to start complaining. And one part of you thinks, "Yeah, I'm pretty
thirsty, too", but the rest of you, the experienced traveller, goes, c'mon,
sit down, pal, quit whining, don't make a fuss, they'll only delay us even
more.
And so, on those Boston flights, everyone followed FAA guidelines: the
cabin crew, the pilots, the passengers. There were four or five fellows
with knives or box-cutters, outnumbered more than ten to one. If they'd
tried to hold up that many people in a parking lot, they'd have been beaten
to a pulp. But up in the air everyone swallowed the FAA's assurance: Go
along with them, be co-operative, the Feds know how to handle these things.
I'm sure there were men and women in those seats thinking, well, there's
not very many of them and they don't have any real weapons, maybe if some
of us were to ... But by the time they realized they were beyond the
protection of the FAA it was too late.
We cannot know all that occurred on three of Tuesday's four terrible
flights. Barbara Olson's 10 attempted cellphone calls to the Justice
Department, trying to persuade them to put her through to her husband,
suggests at the least that there were people in those seats willing to defy
their captors.
But we do know a lot of what happened on that fourth plane, United Airlines
Flight 93. Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and perhaps others
phoned their families to tell them they loved them and to say goodbye. Then
they rushed the hijackers. The plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania,
not at Camp David or the White House. Jeremy Glick knew he would never see
his three-month-old daughter again, but he also understood that he could
play a small part in preserving a world for her to grow up in. By being
willing to sacrifice themselves, Mr. Glick and his comrades saved
thousands, perhaps including even the Vice-President and other senior
officials. They took, in a word, responsibility.
Could you or I do that? This will be a long, messy, bloody war, in which
civilians -- salesmen, waitresses, accountants, Canadian tourists -- are in
the front line. America will need more Jeremy Glicks, and not just in the
air. What Dave Kopel, in a brilliant column for National Review, calls the
"culture of passivity" is spread very wide throughout the West -- the
belief that government knows best and that citizens have sub-contracted out
their responsibilities to protect and defend their liberty. The question of
whether America and its allies have the will to wage this war depends, in
large part, on our ability to resist that "culture of passivity."
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