Word: precious
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...American landscape was one long Memorial Day parade; flags were so precious they were stolen. Yet it was clear that people ached to live bigger lives, to find some way to be a brave and generous part of what most of us were consigned to watch on television. In Napa Valley a four-year-old boy with only one arm cleaned his family's house and took his dollar in pocket money down to the local fire brigade to send to the fire fighters in New York. A five-year-old girl in Audubon, N.J., renamed all her dolls George...
...first 48 hours, the White House staff had spent precious capital reflexively protecting the President's image. To quiet grumbling about the 10 hours it took for Bush to return to the White House, officials belatedly leaked an account that Air Force One had been targeted. Cheney vouched for the report. "I got the data, and it was real and credible," he told an aide. Law-enforcement sources say the White House exaggerated the threat and put the Secret Service and other agencies in the position of having to back up a hyped story. Still, the people were rallying around...
...stakes are as high as they can get. No wonder Bush looked the way he did Tuesday. He disappeared for precious hours in a bunker in Nebraska, which cost more precious hours the next day, as his aides tried to quiet criticism from his allies on the Hill that he should have returned immediately to the White House. (Senator Chuck Hagel reminded his colleagues that "this isn't a John Wayne movie," and he was right.) But this was the wrong time for spinning...
There were smaller but no less precious miracles. Nishikant Kapatker, a city planner for the Port Authority, went in at 8:30 a.m., a half-hour early because he and his wife Jaya, who worked in the nearby American Express Building, expected to go on vacation that evening. Thrown from his chair by the impact of Flight 11, he quickly made his way downstairs, watching 20 or 30 fire fighters climbing up, huffing and puffing toward death...
These ominous days are a time of mourning for our civilization. Much that is precious has been lost. Our sense of trust has been grotesquely violated. Horrors beyond our worst nightmares have been visited upon unsuspecting innocent people. A wicked act by 18 individuals bent on suicidal vengeance may well define the appalling horrors to come of this century. We mourn the loss of loved ones. And we mourn the loss of the sense of innocence that Americans had come to take for granted. Welcome to the 21st century...