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In a message dated 9/19/2001 10:18:48 AM, [log in to unmask] writes: << It's always seems easier to talk when we are not affected directly and it isn't our loved ones who lay dead under all that rubble. While we all hurt, we DON'T hurt like their families and friends do. >> There is an assumption being made here that everyone on the list is at a comfortable, safe remove from the horrible events of September 11. I can categorically state that this is *not* the case. And none of this talk, none of it, comes easy. In fact, many who are directly affected live in dread of a reflexive, shoot 'em up response that will lead to spiralling escalation. Many world leaders who are our allies and supporters are expressing similar concerns. We all want justice and an effective, proactive response to terrorist threats here and everywhere. But how? What will this look like? In this week's New Yorker magazine, Hendrik Hertzberg writes: "With growing ferocity, officials from the President on down have described the bloody deeds as acts of war. But unless a foreign government turns out to have directed the operation (or, at least, to have known and approved its scope in advance), that is a category mistake. The metaphor of war - and it is more metaphor than description - ascribes to the perpetrators a dignity they do not merit, a status they cannot claim, and a strength they do not possess. Worse, it points toward a set of responses that could prove futile or counterproductive. Though the death and destruction these acts caused were on the scale of war, the acts themselves were acts of terrorism, albeit on a wholly unprecedented level." He further writes: "The scale of the damage notwithstanding, a more useful metaphor than war is crime. The terrorists of September 11th are outlaws within a global polity.… Their status and numbers are such that the task of dealing with them should be viewed as a police matter of the most urgent kind. As with all criminal fugitives, the essential job is to find out who and where they are. The goal of foreign and military policy must be to induce recalcitrant governments to cooperate, a goal whose attainment may or may not entail the use of force but cannot usefully entail making general war on the peoples such governments rulee and in some cases (that of Afghanistan, for example) oppress." In another piece in the same magazine, Denis Johnson, who has reported from many violence-torn, devastated areas of the world, writes of this "war" in relation to others he has seen firsthand: "I have now seen two days of war in the biggest city in America. But imagine a succession of such days stretching into years - years in which explosions bring down all the great bulidings, until the last one goes, or until bothering to bring the last one down is just a waste of ammunition. Imagine the people who have already seen years like this turn into lifetimes made up only of days like these we've just seen in New York." The best, in fact the only, way to ensure that our future generations will not experience lifetimes of days like September 11th is to work against hate and terrorism here and everywhere. This will be an arduous process and it will never end. Our days of isolation are over. World peace isn't just a warm fuzzy term. It's a matter of survival. We ignore it at our peril. Those of us in New York know that now, better than ever. Kathleen ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn