14 Cows for America
I cried when I was reading this book to my Bluebonnet Book
Discussion group. They’re 2nd and 3rd
graders. They looked at me strangely,
wondering why I was crying. Then it hit
me – they couldn’t understand why I was crying because they hadn’t lived through
it.
They hadn’t seen the planes crash into the towers. They hadn’t seen desperate people leaping
from skyscraper windows or seen the unbelievable spectacle of the towers
crumbling, as they imploded in a huge cloud of dust. They hadn’t been among the entire mourning
nation that witnessed 9/11. They weren’t
even born then. No wonder they weren’t
touched by this story, “14 cows for America.”
The world I grew up in had a specter hanging over it. It was the specter of the mushroom cloud that
my generation lived with. The practice
air raid drills in school terrified me at night, during the 50s. We practiced hiding under our desks when we
heard the air-raid siren – what a futile exercise that was! At night when an airplane flew over, I would
listen tensely for the whoosh of the bomb.
I thought I would be able to hear it and have time to scramble under my
bed where I would be safe when it hit.
We were living near Richland, Washington then, and the Hanford atomic
plant was an obvious target for whatever foreign threat might want to hit it.
Growing up in Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, I was part of
the generation the media called the “apathetic generation.” We had grown used
to the mushroom cloud specter by then, and life seemed secure and predictable --
safe.
I was in a classroom at the University of Oregon on the day
John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Our
world shook. As I listened to the
University bell tolling all afternoon, I wondered, “How could this happen in
America?” And then assassinations became
a fact of life in America. The Vietnam
War, the protest movements, the race riots, the burning 60s --, of all those
cataclysms, none frightened me in the way that 9/11 did.
On September 11, terrorism reached into our daily
lives. Nothing was safe – not the
airlines or railroads, not the mail system, not even our jobs and financial
systems, as the uncertainties of becoming a target for terrorists began to hit
home. Today we know we’re not safe. Maybe we never were, but there was the
illusion of safety, as I grew up. These
children, these 2nd and 3rd graders, still have that illusion of safety, but
not for long, because their world is such an uncertain place, more uncertain
than mine ever was.
Here is why this book touched me. It is the story of a small Masaai village in
Africa. One of the sons of the village
comes home from his studies as a medical student in America. He tells his people about 9/11, about the
planes crashing into the towers and the people dying. The people in this small village want to do
something to let America know they care about the tragedy. In their village, cows are wealth. They will give 14 cows to America!
In a world where America seems to be a target marked for
extinction by terrorists, there is a kernel of hope. In a world gone mad with
suicide bombers and acts of terrorism in the name of religion, the kernel of
hope is that people do reach out their hands to others. We see it all over the world, as people reach
out to help others, the victims of tsunamis in India, mudslides in Peru, and
earthquakes in Haiti. “14 cows for
America” is symbolic of the good that remains in the face of all that is wrong
with humanity.
