As I watched the mob Jan. 6 attacking the U.S. Capitol, my mind flashed back to another traumatic day when the Capitol was the target of an attack, and I said to myself, “I haven’t been this scared since 9/11.” And that made me think of my friend, Alice Hoagland.
For Alice, 9/11 began at 6:44 that morning, when she was wakened by the phone ringing. On the line was her son, Mark Bingham, who was flying on United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco to be an usher at a friend’s wedding.
“Hi, Mom,” he said. “I just want to tell you that I love you. Three guys have taken over the plane. They say they have a bomb.”
As she and Mark talked about what to do next, Alice heard a low, calm male voice in the background. “Weeks later, when I met Deena Burnett (wife of Tom Burnett, another Flight 93 passenger), we realized that what I heard was Tom talking to her. He was sitting in the seat next to Mark in Row 4.”
Then they said “I love you” one last time, and it was time to for Mark to go and do what he had to do. He, Tom, and two other men — Jeremy Glick and Todd Beamer — led a ferocious attack on the hijackers that diverted the plane from its intended target, the Capitol in Washington. The passengers sacrificed their own lives and stopped Flight 93 from reaching its target, though, as the plane crashed outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone aboard.
Alice was crushed. Mark was her only child, and she loved him dearly. And he felt the same way about her. On the wall behind the desk in his office was a sign reading, “Alice Hoagland is a goddess!”
She missed her son as only a mother can, so she decided to honor him by carrying on his legacy. Mark was a proud gay man, and Alice made the cause of LGBTQ rights her cause too. She got dozens of speaking invitations every year, but she turned almost all of them down.
“Except for gay rights events; I always say ‘yes’ to them,” she said. “I’ve accepted the fact that I’ll always be known as Mark Bingham’s mother, and that’s fine. He’s a hero to me too.”
She kept in contact over the years with the other Flight 93 families. They were all permitted to listen to the cockpit tape of Flight 93’s last minutes.
“I’m not allowed to tell you any details, but let’s just say that the American people have a lot to be proud of,” she said. “In the end, it was the terrorists who were terrorized.”
Last week, while I was watching Joe Biden’s inauguration, I got an email informing me that Alice had recently died peacefully in her sleep. I asked myself, “What would Alice want me to do?” And I knew what she would have said: “Don’t let Mark’s legacy die.” That’s what I’m trying to do now.
We are facing a peril that is even scarier than Al Qaeda because this time the threat isn’t external. It’s right here, in the form of Americans who hate other Americans more than they love America. It’s the same problem that confronted the country after the Civil War: how to create unity after the country has been rent in two. Back then, it was accomplished by throwing African Americans under the bus, and our country has been paying a terrible price ever since.
We can’t let that happen this time. Like Mark, Tom, Jeremy and Todd, we need to work together and prove once and for all that American exceptionalism isn’t just a slogan. Will we go the way of other empires onto the dust heap of history? Or will we finally make America the shining city on a hill that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan dreamed it could be? As Lincoln put it, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth.”
As the delegates to the Constitutional convention in 1787 were filing out of the hall after approving America’s founding document, a woman approached Benjamin Franklin and said, “Well, Dr. Franklin, what have you given us? A monarchy or a republic?”
“A republic, madam,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”
Martin Snapp can be reached at catman442@comcast.net.