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Read other letters about this article
I'm so grateful to him, because he's helping to bring America back to me. I haven't been able to fully mourn September 11, 2001 — because by September 14, 2001, it was turned into a Bush/Cheney commercial. That was the day that I took my flag off my house in Shaker Heights, Ohio, because I heard what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said: that tolerance for gays and abortion brought the terrorist attacks upon us. And nobody repudiated them. I figured that if they weren't contradicted, that wasn't an America I wanted to promote or believe in.
Ever since that day, one of the worst days in my country's history has been a recruitment poster for the Republican Party — a party that has, in the last five years, called me, my husband, and everybody I care about, un-American. How can I possibly describe how devastating that's been — particularly when the media have gone along and endorsed the Bush point of view? There was nobody — NOBODY — speaking for me.
My reaction? Get the hell out of here. And so, two years ago, my husband and I bought property in Montreal, Quebec.
Quebec — the bluest state in North America. A place settled by French Catholics, and now so comfortably secular that anyone can feel at home there. We are gladly leaving. We'll retire to a place that understands us better than the Bush nightmare America has become.
But then, commentaries like Olbermann's pull me back — make me think that the United States, at least the United States that existed in the mind of Edward R. Murrow, is still possible. Is it?
Or is it just an illusion — a rejuvenating hope, born from an ingenious system of government that the Founders devised over 200 years ago, that our best instincts could somehow take shape and govern us in a civilized manner? Is it just a dream that springs from an irrational faith — that no matter how tightly the boundaries of democracy and the separation of powers are stretched, they somehow will always snap back?
I don't know the answer to that, yet. But in the meantime, five years after one of the momentous days America has experienced, I'm left to find hope in the commentary of a former sportscaster who is staking out a lonely place on cable TV.
How sad.
