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by Bill Moyers
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 big political story of the last quarter century, and I started reporting it as a journalist in the late 70s with the first television documentary about political action committees. More recently, at the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, working with my colleague and son, John Moyers, we saw how environmental causes were being overwhelmed by the private funding of elections that gives big donors unequal and undeserved political influence. That's why over the past five years the Schumann brothers - Robert and Ford - and our board have poured both income and principle into political reform through the Clean Money Initiative - the public funding of elections. I intended to talk about this - about the soul of democracy - and then connect it to my television efforts and your environmental work. That was my intention. That'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 11. 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 hoses 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.
That's what terrorists intend. Terrorists don't 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.
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