The Boston Globe 9/30/01

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Two September days - 100 years apart

By Stephen Jay Gould

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die: a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.- Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

I HAVE a large collection of antiquarian books in science, some with beautiful bindings and plates; others dating to the earliest days of printing in the late 15th century. But my most precious possession, the pearl beyond all price in my collection, cost 5 cents when a 13-year-old immigrant, named Joseph Arthur Rosenberg, just off the boat from Hungary, bought it on Oct. 25, 1901. This book, ''Studies in English Grammar,'' written by J.M. Greenwood and published in 1892, carries a small stamp identifying the place of purchase: ''Carroll's book store. Old, rare and curious books. Fulton and Pearl Sts. Brooklyn.''

The arrival of Joseph Arthur Rosenberg, my maternal grandfather Papa Joe, began the history of my family in America. He came with his mother, Leni, and two sisters, Reni and Gus, in steerage aboard the SS Kensington, sailing from Antwerp on Aug. 31 with 60 passengers in first class and 1,000 in steerage. The passenger manifest states that Leni arrived with $6.50 to start her new life. Papa Joe added one other bit of information to the date of purchase and his name, inscribed on the title page. He wrote, with maximal brevity in the most eloquent of all possible words: ''I have landed. Sept. 11th 1901.''

I wanted to visit Ellis Island on Sept. 11, 2001, to stand with my mother, his only surviving child, at his site of entry on my family's centennial. My flight from Milan, scheduled to arrive in New York City at midday, landed in Halifax instead - as the great vista of old and new, the Statue of Liberty and adjacent Ellis Island, with the Twin Towers hovering above, became a tomb for more than 6,000 people, sacrificed to human evil on the 100th anniversary of one little lineage's birth in America. A time to be born and, exactly a century later, a time to die.

Papa Joe lived an ordinary life as a garment worker in New York City. He enjoyed periods of security and endured bouts of poverty; he and my grandmother raised four children, all imbued with the ordinary values that ennoble our species and nation: fairness, kindness, the need to persevere and rise by one's own efforts. In the standard pattern, his generation struggled to solvency; my parents graduated from high school, fought a war, and moved into the middle classes; the third cohort achieved a university education, and some of us have enjoyed professional success.

Papa Joe's story illuminates a beacon that will outshine, in the brightness of hope and goodness, the mad act of spectacular destruction that poisoned his centennial. But his story will prevail by its utter conventionality, not by any claim for unusual courage, pain or suffering.

His pathway follows the odyssey of nearly every American family, beginning with nothing as strangers in a strange land, and eventually prospering, often with delayed gratification several generations later, by accumulated hard work, achieved in decency and fairness.

Especially in a technological age, when airplanes can become powerful bombs, rare acts of depravity seem to overwhelm our landscape, both geographical and psychological. But the ordinary human decency of a billion tiny acts of kindness, done by millions of good people, sets a far more powerful counterweight, albeit invisible for lack of comparable ''news value.'' The trickle of one family that began on Sept. 11, 1901, multiplied by so many million similar and ''ordinary'' stories, will overwhelm the evil of a few on Sept. 11, 2001.

I have stood at Ground Zero and contemplated the sublimity of the twisted wreckage of the largest human structure ever brought down in a catastrophic moment. And I recall the words that we all resented when we had to memorize Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in 5th grade, but that seem so eloquent in their renewed relevance today. ''We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.'' Our nation has not witnessed such a day of death since Gettysburg, and a few other battles of the Civil War, nearly 150 years ago.

The third chapter of Ecclesiastes, quoted to open this piece, begins with contrasts of birth followed by death. But the next pair of statements then reverses the order to sound a theme of tough optimism. Verse three follows destruction with reconstruction: ''A time to kill and a time to heal: a time to break down and a time to build up.''

Verse four then extends the sequence from grim determination to eventual joy: ''A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn and a time to dance.''

My native city of New York, and the whole world, suffered grievously on Sept. 11, 2001. But Papa Joe's message of Sept. 11, 1901, properly generalized across billions of people, will triumph through the agency of ordinary human decency. We have landed.

Lady Liberty still lifts her lamp beside the golden door. And that door leads to the greatest, and largely successful, experiment in democracy ever attempted in human history, upheld by basic goodness across the broadest diversity of ethnicities, economies, geographies, languages, customs and employments that the world has ever known as a single nation.

We fought our bloodiest war to keep our motto, e pluribus unum (one from many), as a vibrant reality. We will win now because ordinary humanity holds a triumphant edge of millions of good people over each evil psychopath. But we will only prevail if we mobilize this latent goodness into permanent vigilance and action. Verse seven epitomizes our necessary course of action at my Papa Joe's centennial: ''A time to rend, and at a time to sew: a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.''

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Stephen Jay Gould, a professor of zoology at Harvard University, is author of ''Questioning the Millennium.''

-- (Stephen J Gould @ Harvard U.edu), September 30, 2001

Answers

....as the great vista of old and new, the Statue of Liberty and adjacent Ellis Island, with the Twin Towers hovering above, became a tomb for more than 6,000 people, sacrificed to human evil on the 100th anniversary of one little lineage's birth in America. A time to be born and, exactly a century later, a time to die.

Interesting that this event has caused the noted scientist to qoute the Bible and invoke such a moralistic abstraction as "evil". Hey Stephen, it's just random molecular dynamics.

-- (BS detector @ WW.West), September 30, 2001.

Well, well, well... if it isn't staunch, nay, evangelical evolutionist S.J. Gould citing chapter and verse. How touching... and after all his efforts to disprove some of the most basic teachings of that Book regarding creation.

Even more interesting is his concept that humans are imbued with "latent goodness"... wonder where Darwin proved, er, theorized that? It would only be reasonable to think he did somewhere, since if evolutionary theory is to remain consistent it has to be at odds with that Book, which teaches that all men have wickedness in their hearts... wicked as in "not good".

The statement regarding America as a "democracy" shows that perhaps S.J.G. should really stick to the dogma of the natural sciences. America is a *republic*, Stephen, if you hadn't noticed... perhaps wishful thinking on your part, hmm? Well, there's always natural selection - maybe, given enough time, America will "evolve" into a democracy.

-- CreatedHuman (evolution@no.way), September 30, 2001.