But I once asked a friend on Wall Street what he thought about the market. "I'm optimistic," he said. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I'm not sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. There are, alas, other sightings to report. It didn't take long for the wartime opportunists-the mercenaries of Washington, the lobbyists, lawyers, and political fundraisers-to crawl out of their offices on K Street determined to grab what they can for their clients. While in New York we are still attending memorial services for firemen and police, while everywhere Americans' cheeks are still stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by terrorism, they are cashing in.

Would you like to know the memorial they would offer the almost six thousand people who died in the attacks? Or the legacy they would provide the ten thousand children who lost a parent in the horror? How do they propose to fight the long and costly war on terrorism America must now undertake?

Why, restore the three-martini lunch-that will surely strike fear in the heart of Osama bin Laden. You think I'm kidding, but bringing back the deductible lunch is one of the proposals on the table in Washington right now. There are members of Congress who believe you should sacrifice in this time of crisis by paying for lobbyists' long lunches. And cut capital gains for the wealthy, naturally-that's America's patriotic duty, too. And while we're at it, don't forget to eliminate the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, enacted fifteen years ago to prevent corporations from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. But don't just repeal their minimum tax; give those corporations a refund for all the minimum tax they have ever been assessed.

You look incredulous. But that's taking place in Washington even as we meet here in Brainerd this morning. What else can America do to strike at the terrorists? Why, slip in a special tax break for poor General Electric, and slip inside the Environmental Protection Agency while everyone's distracted and torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson River of PCBs. Don't worry about NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC reporting it; they're all in the GE family.

It's time for Churchillian courage, we're told. So how would this crowd assure that future generations will look back and say 'This was their finest hour'? That's easy. Give those coal producers freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy companies; and open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling-that's something to remember the 11th of September for. And while the red, white and blue wave at half-mast over the land of the free and the home of the brave-why, give the President the power to discard democratic debate and the rule-of-law concerning controversial trade agreements, and set up secret tribunals to run roughshod over local communities trying to protect their environment and their health. It's happening as we meet. It's happening right now.

If I sound a little bitter about this, I am; the President rightly appeals every day for sacrifice. But to these mercenaries sacrifice is for suckers. So I am bitter, yes, and sad. Our business and political class owes us better than this. After all, it was they who declared class war twenty years ago and it was they who won. They're on top. If ever they were going to put patriotism over profits, if ever they were going to practice the magnanimity of winners, this was the moment. To hide now behind the flag while ripping off a country in crisis fatally - fatally! -separates them from the common course of American life.

Some things just don't change. Once again the Republican Party has lived down to Harry Truman's description of the GOP as guardians of privilege. And as for Truman's Democratic Party-the party of the New Deal and the Fair Deal-well, it breaks my heart to report that the Democratic National Committee has used the terrorist attacks to call for widening the soft money loophole in our election laws. How about that for a patriotic response to terrorism?

Mencken got it right-the journalist H. L. Mencken, who said that when you hear some men talk about their love of country, it's a sign they expect to be paid for it.

Understandably, in the hours after the attacks many environmental organizations stepped down from aggressively pressing their issues. Greenpeace canceled its 30th anniversary celebration. The Sierra Club stopped all advertising, phone banks and mailing. The Environmental Working Group and the PIRGs postponed a national report on chlorination in drinking water. That was the proper way to observe a period of mourning.

Furthermore, in work like this you have to read and respect the mood of a country in crisis, or a misspoken word, even a modest misstep, could lose you the public's ear for years to come. But the polluters and their political cronies accepted no such constraints. Just one day after the attack, one day into the maelstrom of horror, loss, and grief, Republican senators called for prompt consideration of the President's proposal to subsidize the country's largest and richest energy companies. While America was mourning they were marauding. One congressman even suggested that eco-terrorists might be behind the attacks. And with that smear he and his kind went on the offensive in Congress, attempting to attach to a defense bill massive subsidies for the oil, coal, gas and nuclear companies. To a defense bill! What a shameless insult to patriotism! What a slander on the sacrifice of our armed forces! To pile corporate welfare totaling billions of dollars onto a defense bill in an emergency like this is repugnant to the nostrils and a scandal against democracy!

But this is their game. They're counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They're counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket!

Let's face it: they present citizens with no options but to climb back in the ring. We are in what educators call "a teachable moment." And we'll lose it if we roll over and shut up. What's at stake is democracy. Democracy wasn't canceled on the 11th of September, but democracy won't survive if citizens turn into lemmings. Yes, the President is our Commander-in-chief, and in hunting down and destroying the terrorists who are trying to destroy us, we are "all the President's men"-as Henry Kissinger put it after the bombing of Cambodia. But we are not the President's minions. If in the name of the war on terrorism President Bush hands the state over to the energy industry, it's every patriot's duty to join the local opposition. Even in war, politics is about who gets what and who doesn't. If the mercenaries in Washington try to exploit the emergency and America's good faith to grab what they wouldn't get through open debate in peace time, the disloyalty will not be in our dissent but in our subservience. The greatest sedition would be our silence.

Yes, there's a fight going on-against terrorists around the globe, but just as certainly there's a fight going on here at home, to decide the kind of country this will be during and after the war on terrorism. To the Irishman's question-'Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?" the answer has to be: "Come on in. It's our economy, our environment, our country, and our future. If we don't fight, who will?"

What should our strategy be? Here are a couple of suggestions. During two trips to Washington in the last ten days I heard people talking mostly about two big issues of policy: economic stimulus and the national security. How do we renew our economy and safeguard our nation? Guess what? Those are your issues, and you are uniquely equipped to address them with powerful language and persuasive argument.

For example: if you want to fight for the environment, don't hug a tree; hug an economist. Hug the economist who tells you that fossil fuels are not only the third most heavily subsidized economic sector after road transportation and agriculture-they also promote vast inefficiencies. Hug the economist who tells you that the most efficient investment of a dollar is not in fossil fuels but in renewable energy sources that not only provide new jobs but cost less over time. Hug the economist who tells you that the price system matters; it's potentially the most potent tool of all for creating social change. Look what California did this summer in responding to its recent energy crisis with a price structure that rewards those who conserve and punishes those who don't. Californians cut their electric consumption by up to 15%.

Do we want to send the terrorists a message? Go for conservation. Go for clean, home-grown energy. And go for public health. If we reduce emissions from fossil fuel, we will cut the rate of asthma among children. Healthier children and a healthier economy-how about that as a response to terrorism?

As for national security, well, it's time to expose the energy plan before Congress for the dinosaur it is. Everyone knows America needs to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. But this energy plan is more of the same: more subsidies for the rich, more pollution, more waste, more inefficiency. Let's get the message out.

Start with John Adams' wakeup call. The head of NRDC says the terrorist attacks spell out in frightful terms that America's unchecked consumption of oil has become our Achilles heel. It constrains our military options in the face of terror. It leaves our economy dangerously vulnerable to price shocks. It invites environmental degradation, ecological disasters, and potentially catastrophic climate change. Go to Tompaine.com and you will find the two simple facts we need to get to the American people: first, the money we pay at the gasoline pump helps prop up oil-rich sponsors of terrorism like Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Quaddifi. Second, a big reason we spend so much money policing the Middle East-$30 billion every year, by one reckoning-has to do with our dependence on the oil there. So John Adams got it right-the single most important thing environmentalists can do to ensure America's national security is to fight to reduce our nation's dependence on oil, whether imported or domestic.

But don't stop there.

Before the 11th of September the nuclear power industry was salivating at the prospect of the government giving it limited liability for the risks of the meltdown or other nuclear accident. We were told by Vice President Cheney that nuclear power was a "safe technology" that could help alleviate energy shortages and not contribute to greenhouse gases.

But when Dick Cheney invited the energy companies and their lobbyists to write his energy plan, he didn't reckon on terrorism or the advice of Harvey Wassermann. Harvey Wassermann has spent years studying these issues and writing about America's experience with atomic radiation. He tells us that one or both planes that crashed into the World Trade Center could easily have obliterated the two atomic reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson River. Regulations put out by the nuclear regulatory commission regarding plant safety don't address that sort of event, and neither plant was designed to withstand such crashes. Until now Harvey Wassermann's scenario was unthinkable. Had one or both of those jets hit one or both of the operating reactors at Indian Point, the ensuing cloud of radiation would have dwarfed the ones at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. At the very least the massive impact and hellish jet fuel fire would destroy the human ability to control the plants' functions. Vital cooling systems, back-up power generators and communications networks would crumble. The assault would not require a large jet. The safety systems are extremely complex and virtually indefensible. One or more could be wiped out with a wide range of easily deployed small aircraft, ground-based weapons, truck bombs or even chemical/biological assaults aimed at the operating work force. Dozens of US reactors have repeatedly failed even modest security tests over the years. And even heightened wartime standards cannot guarantee protection of the vast, supremely sensitive controls required for reactor safety. Without continuous monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of radioactive rods in the cores and the thousands more stored in those fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately, the Hudson. Striking water, they would blast gigantic billows of horribly radioactive steam into the atmosphere. The radioactive clouds would then enshroud New York, New Jersey, New England, and carry deep into the Atlantic and up into Canada and across to Europe and around the globe again and again. The immediate damage would render thousands of the world's most populous and expensive square miles permanently uninhabitable. All five boroughs of New York City would be an apocalyptic wasteland. All real estate and economic value would be poisonously radioactive throughout the entire region. Who knows how many people would die? As at Three Mile Island, where thousands of farm and wild animals died in heaps, and as at Chernobyl, where soil, water and plant life have been hopelessly irradiated, natural ecosystems on which human and all other life depends would be permanently and irrevocably destroyed; spiritually, psychologically, financially, ecologically, our nation would never recover.

This is what we missed by a mere forty miles near New York City on September 11th. And remember-there are 103 of these potential bombs of the apocalypse now operating in the United States. 103.

I know you see the magnitude of the challenge. I know you see what we're up against. I know you get it-the work that we must do. It's why you mustn't lose heart. Your adversaries will call you unpatriotic for speaking the truth when conformity reigns. Ideologues will smear you for challenging the official view of reality. Mainstream media will ignore you, and those gasbags on cable TV and the radio talk shows will ridicule and vilify you. But I urge you to hold to these words: "In the course of fighting the present fire, we must not abandon our efforts to create fire-resistant structures of the future." Those words were written by my friend Randy Kehler more than ten years ago, as America geared up to fight the Gulf War. They ring as true today. Those fire-resistant structures must include an electoral system that is no longer dominated by big money, where the voices and problems of average people are attended on a fair and equal basis. They must include an energy system that is more sustainable, and less dangerous. And they must include a media that takes its responsibility to inform us as seriously as its interest in entertaining us.

My own personal response to Osama bin Laden is not grand, or rousing, or dramatic. All I know to do is to keep doing as best I can the craft that has been my calling now for most of my adult life. My colleagues and I have rededicated ourselves to the production of several environmental reports that were in progress before September 11. As a result of our two specials this year-Trade Secrets and Earth on Edge-PBS is asking all of public television's production teams to focus on the environment for two weeks around Earth Day next April. Our documentaries will anchor that endeavor. One will report on how an obscure provision in the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) can turn the rule of law upside down and undermine a community's health and environment. Our four-part series on America's First River looks at how the Hudson River shaped America's conservation movement a century ago and, more recently, the modern environmental movement. We're producing another documentary on the search for alternative energy sources, another on children and the environment the questions scientists, researchers and pediatricians are asking about children's vulnerability to hazards in the environment-and we are also making a stab at updating the health of the global environment that we launched last June with Earth on Edge.

What does Osama bin Laden have to do with these? He has given me not one but five thousand and more reasons for journalism to signify on issues that matter. I began this talk with the names of some of them- the victims who died on the 11th of September. I did so because I never want to forget the humanity lost in the horror. I never want to forget the e-mail Forrester Church told me about-sent by a doomed employee in the World Trade Center who, just before his life was over, wrote: "Thank you for being such a great friend." I never want to forget the man and woman holding hands as they leap together to their death. I never want to forget those firemen who just kept going up; they just kept going up. And I never want to forget what Forrester said of this disaster-that the very worst of which human beings are capable can bring out the very best.

I've learned a few things in my 67 years. One thing I've learned that the kingdom of the human heart is large. In addition to hate, it contains courage, in response to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, my parents' generation waged and won a great war, then came home to establish a more prosperous and just America. I inherited the benefits of their courage. So did you. The ordeal was great but prevail they did.

We will, too, if we rise to the spiritual and moral challenge of survival. Michael Berenbaum has defined that challenge for me. As President of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, he worked with people who escaped the Holocaust. Here's what he says: "The question is what to do with the very fact of survival. Over time survivors will be able to answer that question not by a statement about the past but by what they do with the future. Because they have faced death, many will have learned what is more important: Life itself, love, family, community. The simple things we have all taken for granted will bear witness to that reality. The survivors will not be defined by the lives they have led until now but by the lives that they will lead from now on. For the experience of near death to have ultimate meaning, it must take shape in how one rebuilds from the ashes. Such for the individual; so, too, for the nation."

We're survivors, you and I. We will be defined not by the lives we led until the 11th of September, but by the lives we will lead from now on. So go home-make the best grants you've ever made. And the biggest-we have too little time to pinch pennies. Back the committed and courageous people in the field-and back them with media to spread their message. Stick your own neck out. Let your work be charged with passion, and your life with a sense of mission. For when all is said and done, the most important grant you'll ever make is the gift of yourself, to the work at hand.