“As lawyers tend to say, we the Starrs shall be brief. Considering the source of that hollow assurance, and in the grand tradition of the legal profession, here is the Starr family ‘brief,’ our humble pleading for 2002. But how can we turn so immediately inward to family deeds in the face of the great tide of human events flowing all about us…
“Proudly, this nation, hewn from the vast frontier by those great generations who went before us, stands strong, recovering from the unspeakably horrid destruction visited upon the innocents on that date that rings, like December 7, 1941, in infamy. Unlike the attack 61 years ago upon America’s Greatest Generation, the treachery this time came from those duly admitted into the land of the free and home of the brave. And they used our own instruments of commerce against us. Time for Home-land Security, one might say.
“We shall prevail. With apologies to no one, we already are prevailing. And not to worry about opinion polls suggesting that our popularity around the globe is sinking faster than one can utter ‘NASDAQ.’ Americans come from sturdy stock. We gave the world a new birth in freedom, whereas those our forebears left behind in Europe gave us Nazism, Fascism and Communism. (Take note, England is a brave and bold exception to this hothouse of political pathologies.) We’ll take the Declaration of Independence and our beloved Constitution any day. And we genuinely seek good, unapologetically standing for principles which everyone should have learned in kindergarten, captured in the Golden Rule and more elaborately in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Like many American families, we have a flag on every car and one waving proudly outside our home sweet home.”
