By now, the entire world knows of the events of the past few days. One of our daughters called and told us to turn on the TV, because the World Trade Center had been attacked. Amazed, we watched for a little while, then my husband, reared in war-torn Holland, went to the barn to do chores.

I spoke to him shortly thereafter and asked him if he were having flashbacks. He didn’t really respond, but I could tell that he was, indeed, reliving his childhood, during which he, his sister and their mother suffered terribly.

Other Dutch children tried to drop ceramic roof tiles onto the two children, when they walked down the street. When he told me that, I said, "They could have hurt you seriously!" He looked at me in astonishment and said, "They were trying to kill us!"

These two young children watched as American and Canadian fighter pilots fought their German counterparts right over their heads. They picked up pieces of downed airplanes as souvenirs and saw parts of pilots’ torn bodies, at an age when American children were playing marbles and jacks. But, worst of all, other children and adults turned on them, attempting to kill them, making them, innocent children, the enemy, simply because their mother was German.

Could that happen in America? Not unless we choose to let it happen, and we do have the choice. The news media have spent long hours telling us that there could be as many as 10,000 fatalities, as a result of these terrorist at-tacks. How will it affect us? Can we rise above our partisan bickering long enough to fight a battle? Can our congress do so? Let us hope so, because at the present time the irresponsible behavior of our elected representatives accurately mirror that of the citizens who sent them to the various seats of power. We have lost our cohesiveness, as a people, and without that, we may well become a tiger with paper teeth.

We don’t know what price our avowed enemy will pay for the attack on America’s people. Nor do we know whether our citizens will pull together and fight this battle as one, but we will soon have our mettle tested; we will soon see what we Americans are made of. The chaff will sort itself from the wheat, both voluntarily and quickly.

This has been one of the safest countries in the world for a very long time. American children have grown to adult in peace and safety, even when their parents or siblings were fighting wars. We have lost a considerable degree of that level of safety, because we have chosen to become a lawless people, but let us hope that we can pull together, before we become as divided as Europe has been for centuries, before our children come to suffer as European children have done through history.

It is time for Americans to stop taking advantage of each other for political and ideological purposes. It is simply time for Americans to stop fighting with each other and to start fighting for each other, to begin, in fact, to act as though they really are precisely that, Americans.