Lauchlin Currie
Czech Republic

This web-site should be required reading for your schools. Even your media are caught up in the war hysteria. This is the only place I have found refuge.

Larry Busby
Cedar Key, Florida

As with every tragedy, I try to find the good that can come of it. In the case of the world trade towers, It came in the form of Howard Lutnick the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. His company was literally on top of the world. They were housed on the top floors of the tallest building in a city considered to be the center of trade for the world. He was the apex of the most profitable company in that building.

I watched him being interviewed on world news, as he broke down in tears. Here was a very wealthy man who had everything a person could wish for. Numbers were his life, 700 employees were lost in the blink of an eye. He no longer sat at the top of the world, he no longer had 700 employees, and all his wealth no longer mattered, the bottom line seemed so unimportant. He had what some might call an epiphany. He made the statement that he and his four surviving employees were going to rebuild the business. However this time he would do it differently. He vowed that he was going to put emphasis on taking care of the people that work for him. Why do you suppose he made this statement, I believe he had come to realize that a business cannot function without people, let alone become profitable. I truly hope he lives up to this noble promise.

In these times of corporate cutbacks and bottom lines I have watched as companies have forgotten about the human element. It has been a generation since companies have shown loyalty to their employees, which in turn has caused employees not to show any loyalty in return. There is no such thing as a career employee anymore. By the time an employee learns how to do their job, they are let go, so that a company does not have to pay higher wages and benefits. Or the employee moves on to another company that might offer better wages. Many companies have gone to using part time employees, why, its considered more profitable to have two employees that work less than forty hours a week with low wages and no benefits rather than have one person earning higher wages and receiving benefits. Companies have many ways of increasing the bottom line, another such way is to cut staffing all the while increasing their workload. If they do not perform, they are simply let go. Hey there are always some other eager beavers waiting in line to be chewed up and spit out. As a result of this CEO bottom line thinking, American workers are perceived as lazy and uncaring. Products and services in this country have taken a back seat to the bottom line. This typical CEO mentality has infiltrated into all aspects of our lives. CEO politicians are starting to do the same in state and federal governments,who will suffer as the result. Do you suppose the President may be rethinking some of his cutback thinking now, there are some Governors that have been doing the same to their states as well, look at Florida as an example. A Company or a government is only as good as the people who do the work.

Yes, this was a very tragic event, unfortunately it often takes tragedies to bring about change. I am one American that prays that other CEO’s and CEO politicians take stock of the people that work for them. Thank you Cantor Fitzgerald for realizing the importance of the people that work for you. With this new found philosophy I believe that your company will come back stronger than the steel and concrete that used to house your company.

Emilie F. Nichols
Colorado

A Friend (Quaker) gave me a copy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to read. You can find it at http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/black/mlk.htm. I believe this is a good time to read it.

Regards,

Don Pelton
Palo Alto, California

Jane and I went to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Palo Alto on Sunday morning and had to sit in folding chairs in the lobby, where the overflow had spilled. People stood along the walls of the chapel and the lobby throughout the service. Apparently about a third of those in attendance were visitors like us, not regular members.

Early in the service one of the ministers called for all the elementary-school-aged children - and there were many - to come forward and gather near the front of the chapel. From where we sat we couldn't see how many went forward, but we could see that most of the children near us responded to that call by clutching their parents more tightly, and by burying their heads in their mothers' laps, just as I would have done when I was a child, and as our kids would probably have done at that age.

Curiously and wonderfully though, a little later when another invitation went out to the children to come to an adjacent room to work on a quilt, "to help those who are sad," every child got up out of his or her fear and went forward.

Most of us are like that, aren't we? Our impulse to help is so profound that it often feels like a primal biological need.

Apparently the Red Cross and other relief agencies in New York are having to turn away help, so overwhelming is the tide of love and caring.

Out of the depths of unfathomable evil and pain come acts of incredible heroism and love. There are so many stories. We heard about a man at the World Trade Center, now lost, who wouldn't leave the side of his paraplegic friend.

We are opened up and we see the best and worst at once.

It's curious, isn't it, that both of these forces - the best and the worst - seem to come forth most often when our "tribe" is attacked and wounded? Surely this is why we want to hang out our flags. It was the American tribe that was attacked. Our tribe.

Recently I heard the Middle East described as, not nations, but rather "tribes with flags."

I'm not using the word, "tribe," as a pejorative ... not any longer. It really *is* our nature. We evolved in tribes.

For much of my adult life I scoffed at that tribal impulse. I associated it with ignorance and narrowness. I wanted to believe I was above that.

This particular arrogance - along with most other impulses that separated me from my tribe - got blasted into oblivion last Tuesday.

Maybe the best hope for humans on planet Earth right now is not to reject our tribal nature, but rather to fully accept it, and work, as my friend Sunia says, "to make the 'we' bigger." This means, not leaving the tribe, but making the tribe bigger.

A way to begin this process is just to be more conscious. When we feel those noble and legitimate impulses - patriotism, care and love - we should remember that all members of all tribes everywhere feel them just as keenly and just as legitimately as we do.

Maybe an ironic and unexpected side-effect of today's transformation to economic globalization will be an enlarging of the "We." That thought occurred to me when a colleague sent me the following very touching photos from around the world, citizens of many countries grieving *with* us:

http://home.pressroom.com/epicovers/wtc/

Trudy Springer
Olympia, Washington

These were my thoughts three days after the terrible events in NYC and Washington DC. Since I wrote this I am so grateful to find more and more Americans who do not want to rush into a vendetta that will only damage us more in the end. Thank you all for that.

Sept. 14, 2001

The blood lust has been unleashed. The corporate media, the opportunistic politicos and military are feeding this frenzy.

People who have been so angry and frightened by policies that have eroded their jobs, wages, medical coverage, environment, communities, schools, freedoms and futures, now have a target to vent on. Reeling under the rapid awful changes that have taken place, these desperate fools will gladly lead the charge to kill all Muslims and brown people regardless of their nation of origin or their religion.

Radio stations are playing patriotic songs to further incite the passions of blood thirsty, frustrated dolts.

To quote Ernest Hemingway: "The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." This from a man who witnessed World War I and II up close and personal.

I fear for the future, if these hollowing hounds of vengeance are successful. There will be no America as we have known it or as we have dreamed it. There will be global totalitarianism, freedom and democracy will be revealed as the myths they truly were, and slavery unmasked for the reality it has always been.

Thoughts on a beautiful day with birds singing in the leafy green trees under bright blue cloudless skies. A day that finds most of us still reeling from the events of the last three days.

Donald Poochigian
Grand Forks, ND

Why do Americans assume the recent attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon was committed by Muslims? Presumably because Americans assume Muslims have reason to bear a grudge against the American people for all the pain the government of the United States has visited upon the people of Islam. In this there is hope for a compassionate change in the current policy of the United States, the policy which has brought so much suffering to the Islamic world.

Marcus Wohlsen
Brooklyn, NY

I'm usually sympathetic to progressive causes and believe that Americans tend to turn a blind eye to the destructive effects of corporate imperialism around the world. Yet I find myself unnerved by the dogmatic overtones of the progressive response to the events of September 11.

I too would abhor civilian casualties abroad at the hands of the U.S. military if these resulted from an ineffectual jingoistic response to these attacks to appease a vengeful electorate. But if putting that kind of pressure on the governments of, for example, Afghanistan or Iraq, could force their hand, expose their complicity in support of anti-American terrorist networks, and flush out these networks' members, I have a tough time opposing the viability of military action. I am open to any solution that will ensure I don't wake up in New York one morning to find an anthrax cloud blowing into Brooklyn. I'm not so sure some of the avowed pacificts on this board are, and that troubles me. Yes, a violent response might just inflame the passions of disaffected bystanders and breed a new terrorist generation. At the same time, appeasement may very well encourage militants to even bolder attacks.

As Americans know from confrontations with the far right on their own soil, fundamentalists subscribe to a rigid absolutism that willfully refuses to respond to reasoned argument. At this late date, copping to America's foreign policy debacles in the Middle East seems very unlikely to soften the tempers of the Mujihadeen.

I stood at the corner of West Broadway and Duane St. in Tribeca when the first WTC tower collapsed -- outside the blast radius but close enough to feel the earth shake -- a bold, animal, palpable manifestation of hate. In a time of such profound insecurity, you may feel tempted to seek solace in cherished, time-tested beliefs. Have the courage to start over -- admit your uncertainty, your lack of expertise -- to acknowledge that you may have to reassess the premises of your understanding of your place in a world with few places left to run to. Don't let yourself become a victim of the fundamentalist Left (it does exist) just to salvage your sense of self from the ideological wreckage. You aren't who you thought you were anymore.

Barbra Stickler
Birch Bay, WA

GWB can find his voice to sound angry and spout rhetoric. He will take ill-advised actions and alienate our allies; suddenly doing a 180* and beg for help.

It is without argument we need Middle East intervention to snag Osama bin Laden and his boys; or do we want to repeat the Russian version of Viet Nam in Afghanistan? In just two day's research, I found reasons for the hatred of us. Bill Clinton's less-than-successful bombing, followed by bail-out from long term commitment. While reasons were found, there will never be justification for the carnage on Tuesday. Their's is a culture foreign to us. We gave up men on the ground style of intelligence gathering; who do we now have who would assimilate into the Taliban, eat rotten food for years, doing without a woman?

We need to examine our own mistakes. The personalities currently in the administration, I believe, are incapable of such introspection.

Dave Zimny
Oakland, California

I am not a pacifist. I do not believe that violence is always counterproductive. But I do believe that the kind of mindless retaliation contemplated by our government is exactly the kind of response that Osama bin Laden and his supporters were hoping for when they perpetrated their atrocities. Raining bombs on innocent civilians in the name of a "war on terror" will only create the next generation of suicide bombers. Let all progressives, pacifists or not, unite in telling our fellow citizens and the government, "Don't fall into the terrorist trap." Both reason and compassion offer the same counsel: Blind violence accomplishes nothing.

Thomas Tunney

My God - we found friends - thank you.

Susan Sargent
Chelsea, Maine

I awaken to another glorious Maine autumn day. Sparkling sun. Deep blue cloudless sky. I can't wait to get out into the woods for my early morning walk. How fortunate I am to live in rural Maine, and have access to a beautiful forest. All by myself. No one else around except the critters going about their early morning business.

What will my business be today, Monday September 17? Here' some of my to-do list:

I will glance of my tattered Earth flag, faded and worn from so many summers on the flagpole. (Its time to invest in a new one.)

I will water the beautiful red geraniums in the whiskey barrel out under the mailbox. (The whiskey barrel that just sprouted a small American flag over the weekend thanks to a friend.)

I will secure the Peace candle (aka Christmas candle) to the window sill on the second floor, making sure it stays lit for all who pass the house to see.

I will figure out a way to wear an old Peace pendant I dug out of the attic over the weekend.

I will re-registered for the Earth Charter Symposium postponed from this upcoming weekend, now scheduled for early spring.

I will call to thank a friend who had the wits about him to quickly organize a peace and tolerance rally in Portland last Wednesday.

I will send money to the Red Cross, Salvation Army and the Firefighters Relief Fund.

I will keep my scheduled appointment this afternoon with friends from Maine Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Maine Council of Churches. Agenda: to plan global warming strategy and legislation for the upcoming state legislative session.

I will call my environmental activist friends in D.C. to tell them I and others in Maine are beginning again to move onward and upward.

Peace.

Inna Larsen
Madison, WI

Y. Gritzner

I notice that only views that go along with your line of thinking are shown, and you don't have the nerve to print those against.

With skewed thinking like yours, I hate to see what this world would have been like if we had merely "forgiven" the Nazis and hidden our faces in the sand in the hope that we would all love one another one day, kiss and makeup, etc.

People like you don't deserve to be called Americans! Thank God saner voices recognize the threat to our freedom and way of life for what it is and are taking actions to preserve them - even for those misguided, people like you who would see them destroyed along with our country.

You have no friends here....

Karen Salahuddin

I was having a conversation with my 14 yr daughter last night at I took time in months to comb her hair. I figured she was of age to do a good job herself, not realizing the reason she sometimes asked me to brush or braid her hair was for my undivided attention. As we watched the news together, she exhibited a relaxed intensity about the US going to war, her question was, "If we go to war, would we bomb innocent people?" my response was. yes; her next response was. "two wrongs do not make a right!" Thanks correct, but we can't let them get away with what they did, we just have to take our prayers more seriously, she replied I take my prayers very seriously, and why are people crowding all the churches, mosques and synagogues now, when they should have been praying all alone? Out of the mouths of babes, and she is right. I am still speechless over what has happened...........

Thanks,
Choose to have a wonderful day!

Raymond Dooley (U.S. citizen)
Dublin, Ireland

I think it goes without saying that nations, including the United States, have the right to defend themselves when they come under attack. But that doesn't relieve their leaders of the obligation to exercise some intelligence and to avoid recklessly endangering the lives of their own citizens, and it certainly doesn't confer any special rights to kill other innocent civilians who happen to live in countries targeted for counterattack. It's not enough that a response appear to be "justified" and in keeping with the terms of a broad national consensus (easy standards to meet given the enormity of the carnage and the natural impulse to strike back). Setting aside for the moment issues of proportionality, international law, past and current US military intervention and support for various repressive foreign regimes, the US response must also meet the test of actually, and not just apparently, promoting the public safety of the American people.

Here's what I expect will happen in the weeks and months ahead: more resources (after a shake-up) for the FBI and the CIA; greater isolation (if that's possible) of the Palestinians; increased defense spending; funding for Star Wars; strengthening of the sanctions against Iraq (how many dead children so far?); renewed support for police "profiling"; stepped-up involvement in Colombia; black ops vs. Danny Ortega's presidential campaign in Nicaragua (the polls have him in a dead heat); the killing of Osama bin Laden; and major military counterattacks against targets in Afghanistan and Iraq. Will this make the world safer for American citizens? Somehow I doubt it.

Any response purporting to promote the safety of the American public that does not include a serious re-examination of US foreign policy, particularly in the Mideast, is grossly inadequate and will, in all likelihood, place American lives in even greater jeopardy in the future. Forget about the propaganda. We are not just dealing with a small handful of madmen in the pay of evil monsters who can simply be identified, hunted down and eliminated. Unless we address the conditions that have given rise to the hatred and desperation on display this past week, airstrikes and assassinations and invasions will just set the stage for the next round of suicide attacks on the United States and its allies.

Michael Heaton
Ontario-Canada

How ironic that the Right wing governments who call for tax cuts, less public spending, low minimum wages, cut this, cut that, and the slavish devotion to the bottom line is what led to lax airport security that allowed the suicidal terrorists to board those jetliners in the first place. How about the punitive sanctions against countries such as Iraq that have killed un-told numbers of children( who must surely be classified as civilians) and the propping up of un-representative governments in the Middle East, that gave birth to the perpetrators of the crashes at the World Trade Centre? Did we not create monstrous dictators such as Saddam Hussein?
Or the freedom fighter/terrorist Osama-Bin-Laden?
Do we see any acknowledgment of these facts?
No! Instead there are mindless calls for revenge. Blame some-one else! Point the finger! Portray ourselves as innocents! Blameless! The beacons of light in a savage world! Without guilt or responsibility for the horrors that were visited on innocent Arab or Muslim civilians! Civilian deaths that continue even as this debate rages on!
And what about the trade deals that are plunging the majority of the worlds populations into desperate poverty and hunger? Trade deals that place Corporate rights above those of humans.
Are we not reaping that which we ourselves have sown?
No two ways about it! Any decent minded person would call last Tuesdays occurrences " Terrorism".
Therefore I mourn the loss of innocent lives be they American, or African, or Iraqi, or Palestinian or Chechen or Colombian.
We know who is being blamed for the loss of American lives! Who are we to blame for the continuing loss of human life around the globe?
In an enlightened world the only humane response is to abhor and avoid violence.
As Mahatma Gandhi eloquently put it so long ago;
An eye for an eye will only lead to the world becoming blind.
Let us respond to this grievous act with vision instead.
It is only the strong and powerful who can renounce violence, because the strong and the wealthy have so many other options at their disposal. The weak, the powerless, the oppressed obviously don't have many options.
It is time , for the sake of humanity, for the sake of the environment, to renounce violence as a way for human beings to settle their differences.

Julie Barnet
Mt. Rainier, MD

People seem willfully to be confusing explanation with justification. Each time someone brings up the vital ideas so many have mentioned on these pages, that we should look for the root causes of this disaster, and that if you continually terrorize people in other nations terror will eventually find its way back here, the reply is that there is no justification for what happened. We need to keep insisting that understanding why something happens is not the same as justifying it, and that understanding is in fact the only way to chart a course of action that won't cause this to keep happening.

I actually think that most people do know this, just as they know that you don't stamp out violence with violence. Most people were taught as children, and teach their own children, not to hit one another to solve problems: "Don't hit back," "use words," "get help," we tell children when they face aggression. Unfortunately, what they are learning from watching their elders in this system is "punish," "retaliate," "destroy."

If we only had space to think calmly about what to do, I believe most people, even though they are so angry and hurt, would be willing to find a sensible, longlasting approach to stopping the violence. The problem is that with the drumbeat relentlessly sounding, people are not being given that space. How to create it?

Dave Bowers
Boulder, CO

It's interesting to me how the biggest culprit of this situation, petroleum, has it's grip on our foreign policy in the middle-east. Those Americans died for oil. Yet this issue is largely ignored by the mainstream media. This is the opportunity to focus on alternative forms of energy to reduce and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. I wonder if Rudolf Deisel, who invented his engine for soybean oil, would have anything to say? How about American farmers? And what about other forms of alternative fuels that could have seen the benefit from a large investment to fuel a war on energy instead of the $40 billion which our congress just appropriated for a war on terrorism? Or is the war machine just a way to help put our country back on the track away from recession? How nice it would be to see stimulating our economy in a cleaner, healthier and safer world.

Emily Nella

hi. I'm a student at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. a group of us have gotten together to form the Coalition Against Unjust Retaliation. We are trying to organize a nationwide college campus teach-in in the next 2 weeks. I've been using your web site for a lot of info and have great respect for what you've been doing. We need as many people as possible to join in solidarity over this teach-in.

our web site is : http://raptor.slc.edu/~caur/

if you can make a link on your site we would greatly appreciate it. We want college students all over the country to share a day of learning about what the media isn't covering so we can join together in solidarity to protect those still living all over the country. We also are highly concerning for the state of internal racism and violence against Arabs, Muslims, and other minorities. Also if you have contacts with social justice groups at colleges or student affair centers there, please invite them to contact us or let me know so I can contact them. Our organization also has an email address, accessible from the site.

Thank you for all you have been doing.
with peace and hope

Robert Dresbach
Jennings Lodge, OR

My initial thought was to contribute to the discussion of Tuesday’s tragedy by advancing a logical, well reasoned presentation setting forth reasons why heart-felt appeal to our national leaders begging them to respond to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with restraint and justice are an exercise in futility. They can not and will not respond with less than military force.

Any social order resting on foundations of injustice can not to defuse the anger and hatred of those who suffer its injustice by extending justice. Such social orders, inherently unable to act justly, can only repress those who rebel, and thus generate more still injustice and violence.

As a historical example, the American antebellum South comes to mind. To do justice to its slave population would have meant abandoning its social structure. This it could not and would not do. Various forms of repression were its only option.

So too today as then, as world capitalism lives out its operational policy made explicit more than fifty years ago by George F. Kennan. That policy was, to paraphrase Ambassador Kennan, that the United States with six percent of the world’s population consumes more than twenty five percent of the worlds resources – and we should keep it that way. Nothing has changed, only the numbers. Injustice continues to be the rule.