What do you do when the world has changed?
What do you write about when something terrible has happened and uncertainty about the future is thick in the air?
Hard to say. But three days after the terrorist attacks on America 10 years ago, some people decided to come together for a prayer service at the statue of Abraham Lincoln on the lawn of the Illinois Statehouse. In my role as columnist, I went to watch and perhaps to talk to people.
And that’s when I had a memorable conversation with NICHOLAS STOJAKOVICH of Springfield, who was 45 and had come to pray.
He told me then he had come “to be a part of something bigger than myself,” which he defined as the spirit of unity that helps make the United States a great country.
“The genius of this country is that it will survive because there is not one individual or one group of individuals that can destroy this beacon of hope for all the world,” he said, speaking also of the need for acceptance for all people, including many good people he knew of the Islamic faith.
“I would hope that we would exercise patience, love, tolerance, and that we would be committed to justice, not revenge,” he said then.
While a decade is a long time, it’s hard to believe so many years have passed since that conversation. I’ve encountered Stojakovich from time to time in town, including when he spoke at an anti-hate rally outside Springfield’s city hall in 2009 after a noose was found in a city workplace. He was chairman of the Springfield Community Relations Commission at the time, and remains in that group.
To mark the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, I called Stojakovich last week to get the thoughts of this now-55-year-old who has watched his country deal with the terror threat even as he has done his part to make the world better and faced personal adversity in the loss, in an auto accident, of a 26-year-old son, MATTHEW.
Matthew had been riding in the back of a car in Pittsburgh that went out of control, killing the driver and another passenger as well, on Aug. 4, 2008.
Stojakovich says his own loss drives home the hurt of the victims of 9/11.
“You never get over it,” he said. “There’s never really closure, so to speak. You learn to live with a new reality, a new normal. … There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about him. … I talk in my thoughts with him.
“And for me, without my faith in God and trust in him, I would never have made it. I’d have crawled in some kind of hole somewhere and wanted to die.”
There is joy in his life — he’s been married for 15 years to GLORIA RADER and has two married daughters, HANNAH and HEATHER, and two grandchildren with a third on the way.
Then a legal assistant, Stojakovich now is director of Hope in Action Springfield, a local mission outreach of Hope Church, 3000 Lenhart Road.
“I’m making half of what I made before, but I’m just enjoying every bit of it,” he said.
He’s also taken a couple of trips to Kenya to participate in a ministry that helps provide care to poor people in a Nairobi slum area.
“Clearly, 9/11 was a defining mark in all of our lives,” he said last week. “I think prior to that, we had this idea that America was invincible from those types of attacks. It drove home the reality that there are people that unfortunately grow up from childhood in environments of hate, who are indoctrinated to hate things that they really can’t appreciate or don’t understand.”
He continues to emphasize that the vast majority of people of Islamic faith he has met are “decent, God-fearing, peaceful people,” and he said he is bothered by “broad brush” statements that paint that group or others in a bad light.
“We’re a nation that prizes religious liberty,” he said.
He agreed that the nation came together after 9/11.
“It was amazing,” he said. “It’s strange how people that suffer together are sometimes closer than people that are most content. I think that the suffering … forged a bond that really did transcend politics and partisanship.
“It probably was never going to last, but you certainly wish that it could.”
Stojakovich still recalls talking to his daughter Hannah, then 18, who lived not far in Pennsylvania from where one of the hijacked jets crashed.
There was, he said, a “trembling in her voice” as she asked, “Dad, what’s happening to the world?”
Among things that have happened since then — and just in the past couple of years — have been the overthrow of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East in what has become known as “the Arab spring.” He hopes that more freedom for all, including women who have had so few rights in some countries, will take hold, and changing regimes won’t just become a chance for radical terror groups to take power. He thinks there’s an opportunity for America to send teams of people to talk about democracy, and freedom of speech and religion.
“People got tired of being ruled by dictators,” he said. “They want freedom. … It remains to be seen whether it will be achieved in our lifetime, but I certainly hope so.”
Stojakovich lobbied in the past for pro-life causes and said he still believes strongly in the sanctity of life. He considers himself politically independent.
Where does America go from here?
“Hopefully, we will have grown through our sorrow to build a much better tomorrow,” he said, “and that the pain, the acute pain and the reality that we’ve all felt will not cause us to forsake what makes America that shining light on the hill, the beacon of hope to so many people.
“We’re not innocent,” he added. “We’ve made our share of mistakes in foreign policy. … But certainly, I shudder to think what the world would be like without the United States of America. It would be a very dark place.”
With thoughtful people like Stojakovich around, I think the world’s got a chance.
Bernard Schoenburg is political columnist for The State Journal-Register. He can be reached at 788-1540 or bernard.schoenburg@sj-r.com.
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