History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. This amazing country we live in is a very special place indeed. It has celebrated the best of times and anguished through the worst of times. Yet true reforms will not come to pass unless prejudice and racism are crushed from within, one person at a time, elevating us, the people, to a better place.
It is out of civic duty and moral imperative that we must transcend ourselves in these solemn times. To the extent that each one of us loves our fellow men and women, and with the premise that each of us is equipped with a unique set of gifts, skills, tools, and influences, inborn and acquired, we must reach deep within, perhaps beyond the limit and comfort of our own sensibilities and those of the people around us.
We must will the change with all our might before engaging in constructive education and reform. It behooves us today to make our finest hour since the civil rights movement of more than half a century ago. This requires collective introspection. As an immigrant who felt welcomed to this country, I myself begin this personal exploratory journey, an exercise I hope all of us are engaging in.
I first need to muster all the positive inner energy I can for this reflective voyage. There is no better way to accomplish this than for me to rekindle the past, crystallize my thoughts and feelings about this land and her people, and rediscover how I came to fall in love with both. Early on a Sunday morning, October 23, , a formidable explosion perpetrated by a suicide bomber took the lives of Americans.
Among the dead were Marines, 18 Navy sailors, and 3 Army soldiers, in addition to more than injured. The scene of this horrific actβthe worst single-day death toll for Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jimaβwas a nondescript four-story aviation administration building next to the airport in Beirut, Lebanon. It was the headquarters of the US 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, a peacekeeping force dispatched by President Reagan in an attempt to temper the horrors of the Lebanese Civil War, which had been raging since and would not officially end until That emergency room ER was not foreign to mass casualties.
