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Friday Morning Man: 9/11 hero Mark Bingham

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Today, on the 19th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we’re honoring the lives of our courageous heroes like Mark Bingham. He is remembered for having joined with passengers on Flight 93 to thwart the hijackers’ plans. While terrorists intended to crash the plane into the White House, Capitol Building, or Camp David, Bingham was among those who led a revolt, forcing the plane to crash in a field instead. Even though all aboard died, the death toll would have been greater had they not intervened. ⁠ ⁠ An avid rugby player who was a towering 6’4” and founder of the San Francisco Fog Rugby Football Club, Bingham is also memorialized through the Bingham Cup, a biennial tournament established in 2002. We look back at his life at the link in bio. ????

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http://www.awesomestories.com/images/user/8640a0cf9e.jpgMark Bingham was among the heroes on United Flight 93 who are thought to have fought their hijackers 19 years ago today. Their plane went down in Pennsylvania instead of a government building in Washington D.C. as was planned.

Mark’s inspiring story is the subject of the outstanding documentary With You and it is such a wonderful thing that so much video exists of Bingham from throughout what looks to have been a very full and happy life.

We see him in younger years then on the rugby field, in college, on trips abroad and through the eyes of his dynamic mother, Alice Hoagland, who is really something special.

Alice has done a remarkable job of keeping the spirit of her rugby-playing openly gay son alive and talked to my friend Karen Ocamb nine years ago about when he son came out to her.

“I became grateful then that Mark had enough confidence in me and love for me and thought enough of me that he wanted me to be one of the first people in his life to know something very fundamental and true about himself. Even though he knew that my attitudes towards gays was vague and not accurate. I would say that I was vaguely antigay –imbued with stereotypes. I’ve had to fight through that. I am one of those lucky human beings that has done an about face and rejected a lie and embraced the truth. But I wish I had had the courage and goodness of heart to do that on my own.”

“But it took my son to do that for me by acknowledging, by telling me – challenging my stereotypes and telling me, “Mom, I’m gay.” Because of him, I have gone on a different journey in my life. And with all the important things in my life – and all the accomplishments that I have – most of them have been because I had a little boy who grew up to be a man who set me on an important life’s quest.”
mark binghamhttp://swanny67.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/20011029bingham.jpg

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