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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 14, 2003
Men without chests
My subject today is "two years after" the events of Sept. 11th 2001; a common enough subject in the media this last week. But like a Rotary Club speaker I'm going to begin with an anecdote. The connection between this anecdote and great historical events may not at first seem obvious to my reader. So I shall end by trying to explain the connexion. Some moments before sitting down to write this I was walking the streets musing on what to say. I emerged from a Tim Horton's carrying a wax cup of scalding hot agreeably mediocre coffee. Unbeknown to me a young woman was riding a bicycle along the sidewalk behind me. I'm sure unintentionally she knocked me over in such a way that the scalding coffee was poured over my freshly laundered jacket trousers and shirt. >From my point of view that was a minor issue. Of more immediate interest was my back. I slipped a disk a decade ago & have been in some degree of pain ever since. But after the twist I had just received from the bicycle I was in true agony. (Happily it seems now to be dying away.) The girl -- I'm sure she would be outraged that I'm not calling her a "woman" but I reserve that expression only for the mature -- was unharmed. She had not even lost her balance. She partially dismounted a little ahead of me looked back briefly to watch me trying to rise from the sidewalk and from the little pool of coffee that had discharged from my wax cup. She said Sorry! rather cheerfully then remounted her bicycle resuming high speed along the sidewalk threading through the pedestrians. Perhaps she was late for a university class. Perhaps her mother lay dying in a hospital. More likely that's the way she usually rides; and most bicyclists today feel free to use the sidewalks and even to cuss when the oldies get in their way. I got a good glimpse of this girl though significantly she didn't allow our eyes to meet. Her face betrayed no concern. She was quite pretty expensively if casually dressed and appeared well above average intelligence. The speed with which she reached decisions helped confirm this last point. C.S. Lewis wrote about "men without chests" and one often notices in reading today or in looking at the faces about one the overwhelming presence of both men and women upon whom one could not wish to rely in an emergency. It is the new post-Christian Canada and Western world -- already vastly changed since my childhood. It is our post-modern society of abortions soft pornography recreational sex same-sex marriages and fault-free divorce; an age of huge public concern about auto insurance premiums. We live today in what if I were to reduce it to a single word I might call a "degenerate" culture. This is not the whole story however. Equally poignant for instance are the huge number of letters I've received from people utterly unlike that girl on the bicycle (whose "liberal" views on all the listed issues could be safely assumed from her behaviour). The number of people who still have chests -- who retain a modicum of courage and grit and irreducible human decency is also surprisingly large. To invert an old saying Rome wasn't unbuilt in a day. But it was unbuilt as surely as it was builded. For you can take degeneracy only so far before it becomes not the exception but the norm. And the norm has been reached when someone like that girl on the bicycle does something like what she did and will not even stop to examine the consequences. That is the change that has happened in my lifetime the "unbuilding" I've seen as we've progressed from the now-ridiculed "Father Knows Best" world of the 1950s through the various stages of "sex and drugs and rock and roll". It is a voyage of discovery; and in all likelihood there is much worse to come. Though not necessarily. There are pendulating movements in society as well as "progressive" movements; and all trends are potentially reversible. Moreover not all progressive transformations are bad. Progress itself is quite neutral -- it can be towards better or towards worse. To consider progress in itself either a virtue or a vice is as intellectually foolish as it is morally obtuse. Looking back now over two years from the shock that was administered to our systems on 9/11 I think we should get a clearer picture of the event as a kind of divine warning. For here were unquestionably evil men -- the foot-soldiers and carnage-planners of Islamist fanaticism -- who attacked us (sic: attacked us all civilized people) in the belief that we were so degenerate we would quickly fold. At first they were surprised I think twice over: both by the resolution America showed under the leadership of her President and by the extraordinary tolerance of her society. That there were no significant immediate reprisals against innocent Muslims or other conspicuous foreigners spoke tremendously well of the American heart. For I have seen what the consequences can be of such events in another country. America went looking for the perpetrators with remarkable precision -- for the perpetrators themselves and their obvious allies with a cautious will to avoid "collateral damage" -- even among civilians who were cheering the monsters on. This America which had the means if she wished to flatten every Muslim city did not even think of doing so evil a thing. So long as I live I shall be impressed by the America that was revealed in the ashes of the World Trade Centre; by the New York of the firemen who rushed to the scene; by the staff running towards not away from the wreckage at the Pentagon; by the airplane passengers riding into the ground of Pennsylvania. The men with chests rose immediately to the occasion. And God was most certainly with America when it came. But we must ask will He remain? For the connexion between the events great and small is this. God will save those even whole nations who sincerely call upon his aid. But a nation fallen into apostasy cannot even save itself; nor can we save ourselves if we are men without chests. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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