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AMERICAN HERO
Mel Waldman
During 9/11, human barriers melted in the poignant
metamorphosis of American tragedy.
We were close. Yes, for a brief period of time, that
stretched across weeks and perhaps months after the
Twin Towers toppled,
we embraced each other with kind thoughts and deeds.
In our souls, we saw the Phoenix rise again. And we
were one-Americans united by an attack on American
soil.
Yet soon, much too soon, we drifted apart. Perhaps, we
wanted to forget.
During and immediately after 9/11, American heroes
spontaneously emerged throughout the country,
especially in New York, where a canopy of metallic dust
and human debris covered Lower Manhattan.
Police officers, fire fighters, and others, including a beatific
wave of anonymous altruists, acted heroically,
without dreams of glory.
During this horrific period, our noblest selves leaped across
our lonely human walls of isolation and separation.
Yet eventually, we lost our connections. We seemed to lose
our heroism too, here, at home in America, until an unknown
man showed extraordinary courage at a Manhattan subway station.
Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker, leaped from
a subway platform as a train rushed into the station. He dived into the
abyss below to save a 20-year-old man sprawled on the tracks.
The younger man had suffered a seizure.
His convulsions catapulted him off the platform, and into a deathtrap.
And when the Good Samaritan sailed in front of the speeding train,
plunging into the darkness, risking his life as his two young daughters
watched from a distance in the arms of a stranger, he found the lost man,
pushed him into a trough and covered him with his body.
In the trough between the rails, he held the man tight and told him not to
move.
And the train passed over them.
The hero’s daughters, 4 and 6, waited on the platform, covered in a blanket
of terror.
But soon, after the train stopped, the father cried out from under the train
that he and the young man were okay.
Later, after the electricity was cut off, Wesley Autrey emerged from the
trackbed-a true American hero.
Like the heroes of 9/11 and our soldiers overseas, he is willing to risk being
killed to save one human life.
At the end of the day, what can we say? In the privacy of our souls, what
truths will we confess?