A Collection of Thoughts & Writings about the
Sept. 11th Tragedy, Terrorism, and Peace

"We look forward to the time when the Power of Love
will replace the Love of Power.
Then will our world know the blessings of peace."
~Gladstone

• by Rev. Chad O'Shea: "Top Gun"
• by Lytingale: "Falling...."

AN OPEN LETTER TO HEROES

This is to the firefighters, police, rescuers and military of our country -- those who responded on September 11th and those who continue to respond to the terrors of our present time. I write this as a Vietnam veteran, ex-Dustoff (helicopter ambulance) pilot, and a Licensed Professional Counselor with almost a quarter-century of post-graduate experience. Originally written before I left for New York, I offer this with very few changes after working for two weeks with the Red Cross, at Ground Zero, with some of the finest heroes I have had the honor to meet.

I have anguished over whether to write this letter, but I know it must be said. There is no good way to feel like a hero. If you are reading this and wondering why you have survived even more than you are wondering why you are being called a hero, then even more so, this is for you.

No hero feels like a hero . . .

• Unless, you are talking about what the sense of terror mixed with necessity feels like when you look death in the face and know it's your time to do what you know you must do because it must be done -- whether for the sake of lives, truth or humanity.
• Unless, you are talking about the anguish of wondering if you really did your very best, because the nature of tragedies is they're messy and you have yet to accept that no hero can make it ALL right.
• Unless you are talking about the experience of the gut-wrenching guilt, wondering over and over why you survived when others did not.
• Unless you are talking about secretly wondering how much more of the horror and tragedy you can take, because you have accepted that humans may have their limits, while heroes must not.
• Unless you are talking about taking the overwhelming memories of the horror and tragedy into your daily life and into your dreams at night and trying to be normal, when everything in your experience says your personal world is not.
• Unless you are talking about taking whatever accolades may come your way with the choking self-doubt of believing those of your Brothers who really deserved it are no longer here to receive it, except for the others in whose ranks you stand, because they surely did more.
• Unless you are talking about feeling alone with the overwhelming collective weight of these emotions bearing down on you, while secretly fearing that your awesome work will be taken away from you if your truth is discovered.

So, if somebody calls you a hero -- go along with it. If you have these feelings, please accept the truth you already know. You are not an imposter. You know that a hero can be identified by one heroic act, or go unrecognized after a thousand. If you perform a heroic act and it goes unnoticed or unappreciated, you have the satisfaction of knowing you did it. True heroes prefer it that way, hence your discomfort with fame.

Heroes don't lack fear -- you know that from experience -- they have courage. Courage to do what you know must be done in spite of the fear. For one shining moment, you had the courage. There may be many more moments, or no moments at all. You know that courage is doing what needs to be done -- in spite of the fear -- because it's the only thing left to do. That's all heroism is and everything heroism is. No hero feels they've done enough to deserve the label.

And if you get tagged as the hero icon, just remember it's an icon we all need. It represents your potential and your commitment as much as any act you may have done. Your image heals those of us who went before, but were ignored, and it inspires those of us who are yet to come. We need you because you represent the very best of what we have in ourselves -- and we feel a desperate need to remember that right now. You stand up there for those of us who went unrecognized -- and those of us unable to stand up at all.

Your acts represent all the countless heroic acts -- large and small -- that have gone unknown, as well as those acts yet to come. Just always remember what it has taken much of my lifetime to realize: There is no way to feel like a hero. It's okay. Leave it at that. Just remember to take care of yourself, because being a hero is an awesome burden to bear -- and we need you with us. 

~Granville Angell 

© 2001 by Granville Angell. Permission is granted to copy and distribute, except for commercial purposes, if done in the document's entirety, without modification. angell@transitions-counseling.com

From His Holiness the Dalai Lama:
"Since we have a natural compassion in us, and that compassion has to manifest itself, it might be good to awaken it. Violence done to an innocent person, for example, can make us indignant, scandalize us, and in so doing help us to discover our compassion. By its very violence, television might keep us in a state of alert. However, it is very dangerous if violence leads to indifference. Thus, a central point of our teaching is how to reach nonattachment without falling into indifference."
            ~ this is the passage for Sept. 11th in The Path of Tranquility, a book of daily readings ©1998 His Holiness the Dalai Lama 

"The solidarity which binds all men together as members of a common family makes it impossible for wealthy nations to look with indifference upon the hunger, misery and poverty of other nations whose citizens are unable to enjoy even elementary human rights. The nations of the world are becoming more and more dependent on one another and it will not be possible to preserve a lasting peace so long as glaring economic and social imbalances persist."
~Quotation from Catholic Peace document (author unknown)

I can't help crying. As soon as I see a person on TV telling the heart-rendering story of the tragic fate of their loved-one in the World Trade Center disaster, I can't control my tears. But then I wonder why didn't I cry when our troops wiped out some 5,000 poor people in Panama's El Chorillo neighborhood on the excuse of looking for Noriega. Our leaders knew he was hiding elsewhere but we destroyed El Chorillo because the folks living there were nationalists who wanted the U.S. out of Panama completely.

Worse still, why didn't I cry when we killed two million Vietnamese, mostly innocent peasants, in a war which its main architect, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, knew we could not win? When I went to give blood the other day, I spotted a Cambodian doing the same, three up in the line, and that reminded me: Why didn't I cry when we helped Pol Pot butcher another million by giving him arms and money, because he was opposed to "our enemy" (who eventually stopped the killing fields)? 

To stay up but not cry that evening, I decided to go to a movie. I chose Lumumba, at the Film Forum, and again I realized that I hadn't cried when our government arranged for the murder of the Congo's only decent leader, to be replaced by General Mobutu, a greedy, vicious, murdering dictator. Nor did I cry when the CIA arranged for the overthrow of Indonesia's Sukarno, who had fought the Japanese World War II invaders and established a free independent country, and then replaced him by another General, Suharto, who had collaborated with the Japanese and who proceeded to execute at least half a million "Marxists" (in a country where, if folks had ever heard of Marx, it was at best Groucho)?

I watched TV again last night and cried again at the picture of that wonderful now-missing father playing with his two-month old child. Yet when I remembered the slaughter of thousands of Salvadorans, so graphically described in the Times by Ray Bonner, or the rape and murder of those American nuns and lay sisters there, all perpetrated by CIA trained and paid agents, I never shed a tear. I even cried when I heard how brave had been Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, whose political views I detested. But I didn't cry when the US invaded that wonderful tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada and killed innocent citizens who hoped to get a better life by building a tourist airfield, which my government called proof of a Russian base, but then finished building once the island was secure in the US camp again. 

Why didn't I cry when Ariel Sharon, today Israel's prime minister, planned, then ordered, the massacre of two thousand poor Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the same Sharon who, with such other Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists become prime ministers as Begin and Shamir, killed the wives and children of British officers by blowing up the King David hotel where they were billeted?

I guess one only cries only for one's own. But is that a reason to demand vengeance on anyone who might disagree with us? That's what Americans seem to want. Certainly our government does, and so too most of our media. Do we really believe that we have a right to exploit the poor folk of the world for our benefit, because we claim we are free and they are not?

So now we're going to go to war. We are certainly entitled to go after those who killed so many of our innocent brothers and sisters. And we'll win, of course. Against Bin Laden. Against Taliban. Against Iraq. Against whoever and whatever. In the process we'll kill a few innocent children again. Children who have no clothes for the coming winter. No houses to shelter them. And no schools to learn why they are guilty, at two or four or six years old. Maybe Evangelists Falwell and Robertson will claim their death is good because they weren't Christians, and maybe some State Department spokesperson will tell the world that they were so poor that they're now better off.

And then what? Will we now be able to run the world the way we want to? With all the new legislation establishing massive surveillance of you and me, our CEOs will certainly be pleased that the folks demonstrating against globalization will now be cowed for ever. No more riots in Seattle, Quebec or Genoa. Peace at last.

Until next time. Who will it be then? A child grown-up who survived our massacre of his innocent parents in El Chorillo? A Nicaraguan girl who learned that her doctor mother and father were murdered by a bunch of gangsters we called democratic contras who read in the CIA handbook that the best way to destroy the only government which was trying to give the country's poor a better lot was to kill its teachers, health personnel, and government farm workers? Or maybe it will be a bitter Chilean who is convinced that his whole family was wiped out on order of Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who could never tell the difference between a communist and a democratic socialist or even a nationalist.

When will we Americans learn that as long as we keep trying to run the world for the sake of the bottom line, we will suffer someone's revenge? No war will ever stop terrorism as long as we use terror to have our way. So I stopped crying because I stopped watching TV. I went for a walk. Just four houses from mine. There, a crowd had congregated to lay flowers and lit candles in front of our local firehouse. It was closed. It had been closed since Tuesday because the firemen, a wonderful bunch of friendly guys who always greeted neighborhood folks with smiles and good cheer, had rushed so fast to save the victims of the first tower that they perished with them when it collapsed. And I cried again.

So I said to myself when I wrote this, don't send it; some of your students, colleagues, neighbors will hate you, maybe even harm you. But then I put on the TV again, and there was Secretary of State Powell telling me that it will be okay to go to war against these children, these poor folks, these US-haters, because we are civilized and they are not. So I decided to risk it. Maybe, reading this, one more person will ask: Why are so many people in the world ready to die to give us a taste of what we give them?

"The Art of Peace is medicine for a sick world.
There is evil and disorder in the world because people have forgotten
that all things emanate from one source.
Return to that source and leave behind all self-centered thoughts, petty desires, and anger.
Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything."
~ Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969), the founder of Aikido

Waging Peace

Let us deploy our troops. Let our diplomats seek broad international agreement. Let our soldiers advance first, to clear the field of violence. Then let us unleash our most powerful weapons! Let us lay down roads where none has ever been. Let us dig wells of clean water where people can safely drink. Let our armies build hospitals and schools. Let our warriors teach hygiene and mathematics. Let our doctors inoculate against disease, and our soldiers battle malnutrition. Let us scour the Earth clean of terrorism through the merciless application of knowledge, compassion, hope, and tolerance.

Terrorism is the weapon of the desperate and hopeless, the brutally blinded, and the deliberately blind. And we can defeat terrorism. We, America, have the power to do so if we are not ourselves blinded by vengeance, anger, and fear: We hold the light of Liberty.

So let us unleash our weapons of mass construction, even as we deploy our gunships and missiles to defend our endeavors. Let us carry the battle into the tent cities of the Palestinians and the arid crags of Afghanistan, the doctor and the engineer shoulder to shoulder with the U.N. peacekeeper and the U.S. soldier. Let us hurl homes at homelessness, unleash law upon lawlessness, and let justice roll down like a mighty river and wash away the unjust. We have an opportunity, now laid so grievously before us, to start and win a war with our most powerful and uniquely American weapons: love, opportunity,education, and hope. England and Israel teach us that the battle against terrorism takes decades. Let the next generation all over the world say to the terrorist recruiters "Why would we want to harm America, who innoculates our children, houses our poor, champions justice and feeds our hungry?" Only then shall we have defeated terrorism.

So let us arm our soldiers and mourn our dead, and take up both the pen as well as the gun. Let us fix a steel-eyed gaze on the true costs and the real efforts involved, let us gird ourselves against our inevitable losses and unavoidable setbacks. Let us join with all people in all nations who worship in truth and love, and let us set forth on this, the true, final World War. Let us incessantly, relentlessly wage Peace. 

Not in our son's name
Saturday, Sep 15, 2001
Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez's son Greg is one of the Trade Center victims. They have asked that people share this copy of a letter sent to the New York Times as widely as possible.

Our son Greg is among the many missing from the World Trade Center attack. Since we first heard the news, we have shared moments of grief, comfort, hope, despair, fond memories with his wife, the two families, our friends and neighbors, his loving colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald/ESpeed, and all the grieving families that daily meet at the Pierre Hotel.

We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name.

Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Our actions should not serve the same purpose. Let us grieve. Let us reflect and pray. Let us think about a rational response that brings real peace and justice to our world. But let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times.

Copy of our letter to The White House:

Dear President Bush:

Our son is one of the victims of Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center. We read about your response in the last few days and about the resolutions from both Houses, giving you undefined power to respond to the terror attacks.

Your response to this attack does not make us feel better about our son's death. It makes us feel worse. It makes us feel that our government is using our son's memory as a justification to cause suffering for other sons and parents in other lands.

It is not the first time that a person in your position has been given unlimited power and came to regret it. This is not the time for empty gestures to make us feel better. It is not the time to act like bullies. We urge you to think about how our government can develop peaceful, rational solutions to terrorism, solutions that do not sink us to the inhuman level of terrorists.

Sincerely,
Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez

An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice...

"Let me tell you a story. I too, at times, have felt great hate for those who have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It's like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die.

"I have struggled with these feelings many times. It is as if there are two wolves inside me; one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way. But...the other wolf... ah! The littlest thing will send him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all of the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing. Sometimes it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one I feed."

~ Native American wisdom folktale

Promise me,

promise me this day,
promise me now,
while the sun is overhead
exactly at the zenith,
promise me:

Even as they
strike you down
with a mountain of hatred & violence;
even as they step on you & crush you
like a worm,
even as they dismember & disembowel you,
remember, brother,
remember:
man is not our enemy.

The only thing worthy of you is compassion -
invincible, limitless, unconditional.
Hatred will never let you face
the beast in man.

One day, when you face this beast alone,
with your courage intact,
your eyes kind, untroubled
(even as no one sees them),
out of your smile
will bloom a flower.

And those who love you
will behold you
across ten thousand worlds
of birth & dying.

Alone again,
I will go on with bent head,
knowing that love has become eternal.
On the long, rough road,
the sun & the moon
will continue to shine.

~Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese monk)

God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule

"Look, I don't know, maybe I haven't made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again," said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. "Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don't. And to be honest, I'm really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand."... 

Never Back to Normal
by Pat Jobe

Every second we are fighting for our lives. Or playing. Or dancing. Or taking a nap. And when the final napkin is folded, the sum of the contents will be lost. What did that napkin hold? It will be a few people who loved us telling stories around a room, and then heading out, heading home, heading on.

I want to print up a button that reads, "Never Back To Normal."

Nobody would wear one, or maybe a few zealots. Three of you wrote in reply to last week's piece to say that I am not radical enough in my rejection of the war and racist paradigm. I thank God for radical friends.

I'm listening to Don Henley sing, "How Bad You Want It?" I want it bad right this second. I want a world where no parents bury their children, where no Palestinian mother watches her son gunned down. No Jew. No Arab. No Christian. No Buddhist.

No Wall Street broker on the phone to his brother in Alabama saying, "Take care of my children." They are 12, nine, and three.

I want a world where those who have anything apply their resources to empowering, caring for, and feeding those who do not. 

A friend asked me the other night, do the Americans have to do it all? No, the wealthy have to do it all. And the wealthy are any who have more than one of anything: more than one coat, more than one loaf of bread, more than one of anything that somebody else needs. 

My friend said we'll go broke helping others. I don't think so. I haven't yet. Neither has my friend. The fear is that if everybody gives everything to help everybody, nobody will have anything. If you do the math on that one, you'll see it is a very strange fear.

The president wants a sustained war on terrorism; and some commentators compare what might happen to the way the free world pulled together to defeat the enemy in World War II.

The peace and freedom networks say we can all pull together and defeat hunger, racism, violence, and poverty.

John Lennon wrote, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Some day you'll join us; and the world will live as one."

Email me at patjobe@mindspring.com            Radio Free Bubba

A WORLD OUT OF TOUCH WITH ITSELF:
Where the Violence Comes From
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, TIKKUN Magazine: www.Tikkun.org

There is never any justification for acts of terror against innocent civilians - it is the quintessential act of dehumanization and not recognizing the sanctity of others. The violence being directed against Americans today, like the violence being directed against Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorists, or the violence being directed against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army occupying the West Bank and Gaza, seem to point to a world increasingly irrational and out of control. It's understandable why many of us will feel anger.  Demagogues will try to direct that anger at various "target groups" (Muslims are in particular danger, though Yassir Arafat and other Islamic leaders have unequivocally denounced these terrorist acts). The militarists will use this as a moment to call for increased defense spending at the expense of the needy. Right wing may even seek to limit civil liberties. President Bush will feel pressure to look "decisive" and take "strong" action-phrases that can be manipulated toward irrational responses to an irrational attack.

To counter that potential of mass panic, or the manipulation of our fear and anger for narrow political ends, a well-meaning media will instead try to narrow our focus solely on the task of finding and punishing the perpetrators. These people, of course, should be caught and punished. But in some ways this exclusive focus allows us to avoid dealing with the underlying issues. When violence becomes so prevalent throughout the planet, it's too easy to simply talk of "deranged minds." We need to ask ourselves, "What is it in the way that we are living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many people?"

It's true, but not enough, to say that the current violence is a reflection of our estrangement from God. More precisely, it is the way we fail to respond to each other as embodiments of the sacred. We may tell ourselves that the current violence has "nothing to do" with the way that we've learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are literally starving. We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalization with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us. We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us-that that's a different story that is going on somewhere else. But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage; anger and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives.

The same sense of disconnection to the plight of others operates in the minds of many of these terrorists. Raise children in circumstances where no one is there to take care of them, or where they must live by begging or selling their bodies in prostitution, put them in refugee camps and tell them that that they have "no right of return" to their homes, treat them as though they are less valuable and deserving of respect because they are part of some despised national or ethnic group, surround them with a media that extols the rich and makes everyone who is not economically successful and physically trim and conventionally "beautiful" feel bad about themselves, offer them jobs whose sole goal is to enrich the "bottom line" of someone else, and teach them that "looking out for number one" is the only thing anyone "really" cares about and that anyone who believes in love and social justice are merely naive idealists who are destined to always remain powerless, and you will produce a world-wide population of people feeling depressed, angry, and in various ways dysfunctional. Luckily most people don't act out in violent ways - they tend to act out more against themselves, drowning themselves in alcohol or drugs or personal despair. Others turn toward fundamentalist religions or ultra-nationalist extremism. Still others find themselves acting out against people that they love, acting angry or hurtful toward children or relationship partners.

Most Americans will feel puzzled by any reference to this "larger picture." It seems baffling to imagine that somehow we are part of a world system which is slowly destroying the life support system of the planet, and quickly transferring the wealth of the world into our own pockets. We don't feel personally responsible when an American corporation runs a sweatshop in the Philippines or crushes efforts of workers to organize in Singapore. We don't see ourselves implicated when the U.S. refuses to consider the plight of Palestinian refugees or uses the excuse of fighting drugs to support repression in Colombia or other parts of Central America. We don't even see the symbolism when terrorists attack America's military center and our trade center - we talk of them as buildings, though others see them as centers of the forces that are causing the world so much pain. We have narrowed our own attention to "getting through" or "doing well" in our own personal lives, and who has time to focus on all the rest of this? Most of us are leading perfectly reasonable lives within the options that we have available to us-so why should others be angry at us, much less strike out against us? And the truth is, our anger is also understandable: the striking out by others in acts of terror against us is just as irrational as the world-system that it seeks to confront.

When people have learned to de-sanctify each other, to treat each other as means to our own ends, to not feel the pain of those who are suffering, we end up creating a world in which these kinds of terrible acts of violence become more common. This is a world out of touch with itself, filled with people who have forgotten how to recognize and respond to the sacred in each other because we are so used to looking at others from the standpoint of what they can do for us, how we can use them toward our own ends. No one should use this as an excuse for these terrible acts of violence-the absolute quintessence of de-sanctification. I categorically reject any notion that violence is ever justified. It is always an act of de-sanctification, of not being able to see the divine in the other. 

We should pray for the victims and the families of those who have been hurt or murdered in these crazy acts. Yet we should also pray that America does not return to "business as usual," but rather turns to a period of reflection, coming back into touch with our common humanity, asking ourselves how our institutions can best embody our highest values. We may need a global day of atonement and repentance dedicated to finding a way to turn the direction of our society at every level, a return to the most basic Biblical ideal: that every human life is sacred, that "the bottom line" should be the creation of a world of love and caring, and that the best way to prevent these kinds of acts is not to turn ourselves into a police state, but turn ourselves into a society in which social justice, love, and compassion are so prevalent that violence becomes only a distant memory.

* Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of TIKKUN Magazine and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in San Francisco. He is the author of "Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation", "Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul", "The Politics of Meaning", "Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin" (with Cornel West), "Surplus Powerlessness" and most recently (Sept 2001) editor: "Best Contemporary Jewish Writing".  Rabbi Lerner first came to national attention when the Clinton White House began to quote his writings in TIKKUN magazine and he was described by the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as "the guru of the White House" and by the New York Times (which did a five page feature article in its Sunday Magazine on him) as a prophet. He was designated "One of America's 100 Visionaries" by the Utne Reader, and in May received an award from the writer's organization PEN for his outstanding courage in being willing to criticize Israeli policy toward Palestinians (while still critiquing acts of Palestinian terror against Israeli civilians). His op-ed analyzing the mistakes made by the U.S. and Israel at Durban and critiquing the real anti-Semitism that was expressed there appeared on Sept. 5, 2001, on the op-ed page of the New York Times. His book Spirit Matters was described by Jonathan Kozol (author of Amazing Grace) as sensitive, down-to-earth," by Ken Wilber (author of A Brief History of Everything) as "profound and compelling, fully engaging and highly readable," and Rabbi Lerner, according to Rev. Jim Wallis (editor of Sojourners), is "one of America's most important spiritual teachers, a contemporary prophet whose insightful and visionary thinking has already had a profound impact on American culture and thought."
RabbiLerner@tikkun.org                       www.Tikkun.org
510-526 6889 or 415 575 1200