January 18, 2009

The days grow longer; I've just returned from an afternoon of errands and the grey twilight silhouettes the barren branches of the trees beyond my window - the evening filled with the sound of Canadian geese with their eager cries, the meaning of which I have not discerned. It has been a week of waiting; we are in the twilight of one administration and just before the dawn of another. Rarely in our history have we been in such dire straits.

We have noticed things this week - the French, who have considered themselves far more advanced in the way they deal with race have found themselves now questioning. How could we backward Americans elect a man of color to the White House when in France almost no one of color has any important posts at all?

In the Great Depression, it was said that people threw themselves from their office windows into the Great Beyond. Today it seems that instead of throwing oneself from a window desperate men are throwing themselves in front of speeding trains. At least three financiers have met their end that way, the most famous being the German Warren Buffet, Merckle. Having made a series of bad
financial bets, he ended his life by stepping in front of a train. He was the third financier who met his end this way in the last three months.

Financial news continued to be unremittingly bad. The world was in need of some hopeful sign, some signal that the world still worked the way we thought it did. The hope came from an unlikely event, a meeting of an Airbus 320 and a flock of Canadian geese. Flying out of LaGuardia, U S Airways Flight 1549 ran straight into a thicket of geese that got sucked into the engines and succeeded in doing what no one thought birds could do - completely kill the engines. Sitting at lunch in Los Angeles, my phone chirped that a text message had arrived. From friend and colleague Todd Matthews it said: you okay? Plane just crashed in New York. It was my first exposure to the extraordinary story that unfolded on Thursday.

With engines dead, the pilot made a command decision to bring his plane down into the Hudson River, thereby not risking a crash over densely populated Manhattan or New Jersey. What was achieved seems singular: the successful ditching of a plane. 155 people were on board, 155 ended up walking away. It is a story that in its telling brings tears to people's eyes. A valiant pilot
performed the impossible. The passengers panicked for a moment and then rallied, behaving in a manner that seemed to evoke another age - women and children first, men following, ending up
standing on the wings in frigid cold Hudson River. As cold as it was there was no ice on the river - that probably would have torn the plane apart. From all around the New York area boats began to
converge to take on survivors, ferries cast off the moment they saw the plane hit and began to move into position. The two pilots, Captain Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III and First Officer Jeffrey B. Skiles, performed flawlessly.

After the plane emptied, Sullenberger walked the sinking craft to make sure no one was still on board and, in the great tradition of the sea, was the last man to leave. He carried the manifest off
the plane and, when rescued, began a cool accounting of the people on board, finding that all had made it and that injuries were relatively minor. Governor Paterson declared it "the miracle on
the Hudson". Indeed, it was - and for a very beat down country it stood out as a moment in which everything worked correctly in a time when nothing seems to be working correctly.

People behaved well, the Captain was a Captain in every sense of what we expect someone with that title to be - and is an individual who may inspire others to be as he was, married to his
duties, performing them without apparent fear.

We needed a moment of hope, of example, and Flight 1549 gave us that hope, a moment in which we could be proud of our fellowmen.