Will is the son of Cynthia Barnett, who's an associate editor for this magazine, and her husband, Aaron Hoover, a science writer at the University of Florida who's finishing up a master's degree in fisheries. They're delightful people and wonderful, caring parents enthralled with the miracle of their new son.
Will is important because he's part of the generation through which we all will rediscover hope. At the moment, Florida and America still seem clouded by a new, unimagined capacity for evil. Men came here to our country and our state as guests, lived and learned among us and then committed horrific acts intended to take away lives, our sense of safety and free movement, and our ability to do business with each other and the world.
The most striking thing about them in many ways is that they seem like modern people -- like those on whom the future depends. They were educated. Many had studied at at technical and engineering schools in their own lands and in other countries. They spoke several languages -- English, French and German, among others -- in addition to Arabic.
But they came with a deep and profound hatred of the modernity they embraced to be able to live and work -- and then kill -- among us. At bottom, did they believe that their own values and culture were so weak and inferior to ours that the only way to preserve them was to destroy every way through which cultures can interact? As their chief target, they did not pick a grand symbol of freedom like the Statue of Liberty; instead, they picked buildings that represented trade and commerce -- the means through which healthy, secure cultures and countries learn to create opportunities for better lives for their people. (Obscured in the week after the attacks was the encouraging news that China, after 15 years of negotiations, would join the World Trade Organization -- an agreement that will bring 1 billion people into the world trading system.)
Neither the murders nor the terrorists' willingness to die in the act vindicated their values, however. Suicide, at its most basic, represents an admission of defeat. Self-destruction can be a personal act of despair or a murderous terrorist act rationalized through dreams of rewards in a blissful hereafter. In either case, however, it represents a loss of the ability to perceive a better future and the will to work toward it.
All the flag-waving and anthem-singing that have continued to pour out of the American people since the attacks get lumped together as "patriotism,'' but at the core they're a reassertion of optimism -- of faith in that ability to see a better future and strive for it. That's a very fundamental American trait. In all the breast-beating over Americans not understanding foreign cultures that followed the attacks, few pointed out that those who struck against us understand even less of us -- as has always been the fatal flaw of America's enemies.
Another fundamental American characteristic is a confidence that our culture and values can succeed along with others -- indeed, can embrace the cultures and values of others. Jim Bacchus, a thoughtful Floridian who's learned a lot about other cultures and peoples as a judge on the appellate court of the World Trade Organization, said in a commencement address recently at the University of Central Florida: "In giving us that spark of divinity, in giving each of us that special part of us that makes us human, our Creator has shown each of us that the only way that any of us will ever be able to give true and enduring meaning to our lives is through the others who share that special spark. God gave us each other. And the best way by far for us to love and serve God is by loving and serving each other."
Those are the values that Will Isaac Hoover, and my children, and the children of those killed by the terrorists, and all our children will inherit. And preserve.
In the last weeks of her pregnancy, immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cynthia, Will's mother, says she had a number of conversations with well-wishers who nonetheless asked her questions about whether it was depressing to be bringing a baby into the world at such a sad and uncertain time. "It's exactly the other way around," Cynthia says. "I told them what better time to be bringing a baby into the world." Her child, she told them, "represents hope for the future."