Not even the horrifying moments of 9/11 tested the national will as it's being sorely tested this holiday season.
Good news is hard to come by. Grim news is abundant and tirelessly repetitive. War tears at the seams of the civilized world, leaving anguish, destruction, barbaric acts, hopelessness in its wake.
The dreaded knock on the door will bring ghastly sorrow to dozens of American families during the Christmas holiday as they learn of the deaths of military and civilian sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Families whose breadwinners have lost their jobs will have scant little to cheer.
Add to this the predictable holiday tragedies at home—fatal fires, deadly traffic accidents, lethal crimes--and grief and despair will be even more widespread in the land.
And yet. . . .
Americans of every stripe and calling have an uncanny strength and capacity to bear unthinkable pain, to endure unimaginable sorrow, to rise above impossible personal burdens.
Inevitably, the best in the American character always emerges when confronted and tested by the worst of conditions.
This will to remain hopeful and optimistic is undergoing extraordinary testing during this holiday season--for Christians at Christmas, for Jews during Chanukah, for Muslims only a few weeks ago during Ramadan and Eid-ul Fitr. Their cultures are involved in bloody war and insurrection in the Middle East.
However, despite bloodshed and unspeakable disruptions to homes, peace continues to be an abiding hope and passion among all peoples and religions.
The instinctive impulse to resort to force of arms when confronted with real or imagined danger is humankind's most grievous failing. But it's most redeeming quality is the unwavering, determined quest of men and women everywhere and in every culture to use the force of their convictions and the strength of their numbers to end bloodshed.
Americans especially are truly are blessed in their religious and political heritages to have the freedom through prayer and civic activism to work against violence and for peace.
Whatever other grim conditions and events dominate news from the Middle East, and regardless of differences that might separate them in their political and social alliances, Americans are bound together by a buoyant confidence that goodness, not evil, is the ultimate driving impulse in humankind.
The rest of the world has tried and failed with other forms of social order. The American model--a society free to enjoy human liberties and to live harmoniously with a bouquet of cultural differences-- remains the standard to which others aspire.
May we be wise enough to always appreciate and preserve that.
