A Search to Understand

A Search to Understand


Every morning I drive over the Great South Bay bridge, cross the State boat channel bascule bridge and head west along Ocean Parkway towards Meadowbrook and eventually JFK Airport. On Tuesday morning, September 11, the sun made the sky and water blue. The radio announcer said it was a top ten, meaning one of the ten best weather days we would have all year. There were two boats on the bay. I remembered back to years ago when there were hundreds of clam boats on the bay.

As Tuesday's events unfolded, it became obvious that our world has changed forever. F15 fighter jets from McQuire Air Force Base circled JFK Airport. Armed security officers searched roofs of buildings. All types of road closures made travel almost impossible. When I got home, I put up the American flag.

Wednesday morning I saw an aircraft carrier with F 18s not far off the shore of Gilgo Beach. I have never seen an aircraft carrier at sea so close to shore. The next day a Navy destroyer joined it.

Todd, my next door neighbor, a NYC fireman was called to the Trade Center to search for bodies. He has only been home a few hours in the past week.

I listened to the National Day of Mourning Services held in Washington on Friday afternoon. Reverend Billy Graham spoke and reminded the congregation that God is with us through these troubled times. At Sunday’s church service at Cross of Christ Lutheran Church in Babylon, Pastor Bond’s sermon expressed similar thoughts and prayers. We sang Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.”

The terrorist’s attack on civilization has caused the President of the United States to declare war. Personally, I have struggled to fathom the depths of evil, the intense hatred that not only planned, but also carried out the atrocity perpetrated on the innocent.

The fictional character, John Galt has a soliloquy, in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” I have paraphrased the author’s words from pages 930 to 970 and offer them herein, as I search to understand this act of evil.

In part, Galt states, “ The question to be or not to be, is to think or not to think. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking.

A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. There is only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason. Every man is an end of himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest morale purpose. “

“It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live. No, you do not have to live, you must live as a man-by the work and judgement of your mind.

Man can not survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty he perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by the mind.

My (Galt’s) morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason - Purpose - Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge-Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve-Self esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness and pride.

…To withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement-that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devalue your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only evil can profit-and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man can commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together no man may initiate-do you hear me? No man may start-the use of physical force against others.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. …And death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you (the terrorist) and your system will achieve.”

“I do not want to grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not place any moral sanction upon a murder’s wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him-by force.

It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a hold up man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.

Our terms and our motive power are antithesis of yours. You (the terrorist) have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.

Building is not done by abstaining from destruction…. It will not raise one single girder. …And now you (the terrorist) cannot say to me, the builder: “Produce and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.” I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil not value is an absence and a negation; evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero (terrorist) cannot hold a mortgage over life.

You (the terrorist) do not wish to live. … The only act that can save you: thinking. Yours is the morality of death.

Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that the pursuer is yourself.

Damnation is the start of your morality; destruction is its purpose, means and end.”

To the reader - “it is your mind they (the terrorists) want you to surrender.”

“Those irrational wishes that draw you (enlistees) to their (terrorist’s) creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose alter you sacrifice the earth, that dark incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of (your) god or your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind. An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

As they (the terrorists) seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants (or destroy the World Trade Towers), so they seek not to think, but to take over human thinking. They are attempting to take us back to darker ages then any our history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language.

Make no mistake about the character of terrorists. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages-and power, the power to rule by force, has always been their only lust.”

This is why the President said we must retaliate.

Henry W. Hessing, PE