Egregious Error in Judgment -- or Not

Mark Wahlberg expressed this week in a magazine article what many parents believe: if I were on a hijacked plane with my children, I too would do anything to try to save their lives. That may make me sound foolish and filled with false bravado, but no one is going to hurt my family if I can do anything, anything at all to prevent that from happening. Wahlberg is being skewered in the media for thinking he is as good as the action movies he makes, but he wasn’t speaking as some macho movie actor: he was speaking as a father who would sacrifice his life to protect his children’s lives, and so would I – and so would you.

Wahlberg’s comments don’t take away from what passengers did on Flight 93: his comments affirm that those “macho male” passengers changed the outcome intended by the terrorists because they refused to go down without a fight. And that’s what Wahlberg professes he would have done: fight back, especially had his children been on the flight with him. He may not have been successful, and he may have been frozen by fear, just like so many other passengers would be, but in his mind, he would have gone down fighting for the lives of his children.

Shake off his comments as uninformed, overly-enthusiastic, or misguided, but crucifying him in the media as somehow guilty of somehow hurting people whose loved ones were on the planes and died? That’s a big leap, folks.