Editor’s note: The Editorial Board below is republished from The Daily Orange’s paper on Sept. 12, 2001. Then-Editorial Editor Colin Steele compiled the Editorial Board after conducting the meeting.

The bright colors of our country’s flag never shone so brightly for America’s young students.

Putting up with accusations of apathy and a lack of national pride, students always faced one question: When the defining moment of our generation finally happened — their Vietnam War, their Pearl Harbor — how would they react? Many seemed to think they would shrug their shoulders and continue down their path of apathy and laziness.

But all that changed on Tuesday.

In the wake of the biggest terrorist attack in history, students at Syracuse University traded in apathy for activism, and should be commended.

At a school that is cold both in weather and social atmosphere, complete strangers packed the Schine Student Center to watch the events unfold. People gathered in front of their Euclid Avenue homes to talk, reflect and console those with friends or family members in New York or Washington, D.C. Almost everyone on campus knows someone who could have been in danger, or knows a fellow student who does.

Tuesday, students acted on these relationships. They attended services at Hendricks Chapel and the Alibrandi Catholic Center.

They donated blood to assist survivors of the tragedy. They showed their best faces at a time when it would have been easy to show their worst.

But their humanitarianism does not overshadow the catastrophe and its effects.

This generation’s innocence is gone forever. The things it took for granted, like traveling and working, are now causes of concern. Its overall sense of safety — no matter how naive it was — has been rattled like the buildings the hijacked planes struck.

The harsh reality of the attacks came courtesy of a live cable wire.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, there was no live coverage. It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s job to convey the enormity of the situation to the nation. But network news has taken over that role by displaying images most people thought were confined to movie theaters — commercial airliners speeding into skyscrapers, the nation’s defense headquarters burning, people running down soot-covered streets amidst a shower of debris. These are things nobody ever thought could really happen. Now that they have, they raise serious questions.

We’ve all walked through airport metal detectors and thought how easy it would be to sneak something onboard. Tragedies do not occur more frequently because most people are not malicious or insane enough to commit them, not because they cannot do it. Tuesday’s events showed what can happen when such people do act.

It is easy to point out the losses in the attack on America. But our nation still has its government in place, and as SU students showed, it still has its moral resolve.

And as Francis Scott Key wrote in our national anthem, “And the rocket’s red glare/The bombs bursting in air/Gave proof through the night/That our flag was still there.”

Published on September 11, 2016 at 9:27 pm

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