DAN HANSON has a nice tribute to the passengers of Flight 93:

In their calmness and obvious resolve, they sent a message to all of us. A message that said, “This is who we are. This is how free people live, and this is how they die.” And from that moment on, we all knew what we were capable of doing.

In the dark days that followed September 11, it would have been easy to cower in fear, to believe that our generation was not up to this fight. Had it not been for the heroes of Flight 93, we might have been reading articles today lamenting the past, telling us how the stuff of “The Greatest Generation” of WWII had been lost. We might have questioned our resolve, and even looked for an easy way out.

But the doomed and valiant passengers of Flight 93 reached out to us with a different message, and lifted a great weight off our shoulders. They told us that the Greatest Generation is every generation that is forced to stand up and be counted. Our time has come, and in the final heroic acts of those 39 people, the example has been set.

On one of the TV programs I watched today (I’ve forgotten which network it was) someone said that the Flight 93 passengers hadn’t gotten much attention. That seemed odd to me. I think they’ve gotten a lot. But maybe the point was that while some people have noticed, not everyone has gotten the message. Yet.