The fol­low­ing arti­cle was  writ­ten by Mr. Cor­nel Nis­torescu and pub­lished under the title “Cintare Americii“on Sep­tem­ber 24, 2001 in the Roman­ian news­pa­per Eveni­men­tul zilei (The Daily Event)

Why are Amer­i­cans so united? They don’t resem­ble one another even if you paint them! They speak all the lan­guages of the world and form an aston­ish­ing mix­ture of civ­i­liza­tions. Some of them are nearly extinct, oth­ers are incom­pat­i­ble with one another, and in mat­ters of reli­gious beliefs, not even God can count how many they are. Still, the Amer­i­can tragedy turned three hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the army, the secret ser­vices that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed on the streets nearby to gape about. The Amer­i­cans vol­un­teered to donate blood and to give a help­ing hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised the flag on the smok­ing ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colours of the national flag. They placed flags on build­ings and cars as if in every place and on every car a min­is­ter or the pres­i­dent was pass­ing. On every occa­sion they started singing their tra­di­tional song: “God Bless Amer­ica!”.

Silent as a rock, I watched the char­ity con­cert broad­cast on Sat­ur­day once, twice, three times, on dif­fer­ent tv chan­nels. There were Clint East­wood, Willie Nel­son, Robert de Niro, Julia Roberts, Cas­sius Clay, Jack Nichol­son, Bruce Spring­steen, Sil­vester Stalone, James Wood, and many oth­ers whom no film or pro­duc­ers could ever bring together. The American’s sol­i­dar­ity spirit turned them into a choir. Actu­ally, choir is not the word. What you could hear was the heavy artillery of the Amer­i­can soul. What nei­ther George W. Bush, nor Bill Clin­ton, nor Colin Pow­ell could say with­out fac­ing the risk of stum­bling over words and sounds, was being heard in a great and unmis­tak­able way in this char­ity con­cert. I don’t know how it hap­pened that all this obses­sive singing of Amer­ica didn’t sound croaky, nation­al­ist, or osten­ta­tious! It made you green with envy because you weren’t able to sing for your coun­try with­out run­ning the risk of being con­sid­ered chau­vin­ist, ridicu­lous, or sus­pected of who-knows-what mean inter­ests. I watched the live broad­cast and the rerun of its rerun for hours lis­ten­ing to the story of the guy who went down one hun­dred floors with a woman in a wheel­chair with­out know­ing who she was, or of the Cal­i­forn­ian hockey player, who fought with the ter­ror­ists and pre­vented the plane from hit­ting a tar­get that would have killed other hun­dreds or thou­sands of peo­ple. How on earth were they able to sac­ri­fice for their fel­low humans? Imper­cep­ti­bly, with every word and musi­cal note, the mem­ory of some turned into a mod­ern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars were put in a col­lec­tion aimed at reward­ing not a man or a fam­ily, but a spirit which noth­ing can buy.

What on earth can unite the Amer­i­cans in such a way? Their land? Their gal­lop­ing his­tory? Their eco­nomic power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, hum­ming songs and mur­mur­ing phrases which risk of sound­ing like com­mon­places. I thought things over, but I reached only one conclusion.

Only free­dom can work such miracles!