downwitchyobadself
Thread Starter
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2000
- Messages
- 941
Hi all. I'm a frequent visitor to other forums here, and sometimes cruise through the random discussion to see you ranting, raving, and chatting, usually in that order.
A few days back, someone sent me the following text, written by a friend who is also a reporter for the AP, stationed in Quetta. I was struck by it, and sent out a big e-mail to friends and strangers (and I'm not the forwarding type) with the text attached. It stirred up some interesting reactions, and most of the people to whom it was sent are a little more, er, calm than this forum's regular posters. So, I thought I'd put it here and see what you all thought.
I will repeat what I said in my e-mail at the time: I think this is something every American should read. If you agree with me, please help see that they do.
---------------------------------------
To whomever happens across these reflections:
This is a letter from a gray-beard American foreign correspondent sitting near the Afghan border waiting for Islamic zealots to grant him permission to go see damage wrought by U.S. zealots on destitute people caught between the two.
It is for family and friends and, more specifically, to be put aside for my young grandnephews and nieces, a growing crop of amazing personhood. I know that none of the intended recipients would mind sharing the contents, which are thoughts on what I've learned in 30 years of watching us get into this mess. But I emphasize: this is my view and does not engage my employer in any way.
We are deep in the poo, and we dug the pit ourselves. Unless we very carefully extract ourselves, the world you kids find will be vastly different, and a great deal less pleasant than the one your parents knew. With wisdom and patience, we can end up making things better for everyone.
Because too many of us were selfish and dumb, we Americans squandered the gift of being able to walk freely and proudly through a great, wide world. For all our good qualities, we ignored the one requisite for survival on a disparate planet: the ability to see things from someone else's perspective. So now a small number of disturbed but cunning people can use this against us, just as a 97-pound weakling who knows his martial arts can, in the right circumstances, flip a 900-pound gorilla onto its tush.
Let's say our weakling meets his gorilla after it has, for decades, pissed off most other animals in the jungle. The poor ape meant well; he even thought he was loved for his generosity. Strong animals supported him for their own reasons. But weaker and far more numerous animals resented what they saw as spotty, self-directed token help, the occasional toss of a banana in the face of great hunger.
The gorillas only hope is to go against its nature. Rather than pound its chest and bellow and fling its arms, it has to reflect on why the 97-pound weakling has so much backing from so many poor souls in so many places.
Now, let's make our gorilla into a guerrilla, a holy warrior such as Osama bin Laden. Never mind what we think he is. Let's, for a change, look at things from someone else's perspective. If we kill him without convincing public evidence of guilt, we make him a martyr, adding infinitely to his symbolic power. If we make lots of noise in going after him, and then fail, we add to his real power and humiliate ourselves to impotence in the process.
Our problem, in any case, is not crushing bin Laden and his network. In a world of six billion, there are going to be dangerous loonies. Fact of life, like earthquakes and oil spills. And let's get real here. Even if we had had the most stringent controls of Stalinist Russia, updated with modern technology, we couldnt have prevented the WTC assault--at least not the first one. Hijackers used box cutters, for God's sake. Next it'll be origami knives torn from a holy text. Their target was 90 seconds off a flight corridor. Fighters can't scramble that fast.
Our real challenge is finding a way to channel the pitifully small amount necessary into other countries--schools, child health clinics, water catchment areas, farm roads...all that boring stuff that went out of fashion decades ago. We boast about our generosity. Foreign aid totals about 7 billion dollars a year. If you subtract what goes back to American contractors, what is stolen because of lousy controls, what goes into military crap and perks to win political friends, what is left for real foreign aid probably amounts to the cost of spoiled unsold hotdogs tossed out after a baseball season.
It's painful to watch Tomahawk missiles slamming into harmless mud buildings when you think that the cost of each one could educate a South Asian village for decades. Beyond that 7 billion, there is all the emergency aid we pour into disaster relief. But thats another story. It would cost a lot less to avoid the disasters, thus sparing unbelievable amounts of misery no amount of aid can undo.
The bombing goes on, as much a product of our helpless frustration as a means of pursuing strategic goals. We have killed uncounted infants, children, women in shapeless sacks who are not, in any case, permitted to have political/religious views. What little of Kabul and Kandahar was left after decades of mayhem is now even farther beyond repair. When you figure the cost, counting all those steak dinners and video movies sent to pilots on Diego Garcia and ships at sea, that's a lot of books and school lunches.
However complicated the Washington lifers try to make it, it is dead simple. Nationality does not define people. We're all human. Educate a kid, and hell be a lot less likely to listen to lunatics like bin Laden. Of course, we missed a generation, so put this down to long term. Now we have a short-term calamity to confront. Easy enough. Whats terrorism? The sowing of fear among fearful people. We used to have wise presidents, not slick ones, guys who said things like, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Exactly. September 11 was a horrible black day. But the world has seen others and survived. When something like that happens, and it may again, it is absolutely crucial to understand it for exactly what it was--a single, criminal act--and not make it worse by giving up our freedoms, our way of life, our concept of humanity, our basic dignity.
Take this anthrax thing. Very scary. But mailings to selected victims should not send a brave nation of a quarter billion people screaming to their drug stores for Cipro. For whoever does this, the point is not
to give some unlucky people anthrax. It is to empty the Capitol, to stop, to make sane people afraid of their own mailboxes. So far, they're winning.
Did someone suggest you get a gas mask? I mean, really. . .
Try this. Borrow someone else's mask, put it on, and look in the mirror. Then, with all that rubber covering your face, try to sing: "The home of the brave, and the land of the free."
We must learn perspective. We have no lock on love and grief. A mother in Papua or Palestine does not love her kids less than a mother in our American heartland. We mourn 6,000, suddenly lost at once in an act of senseless, cruel murder. Elsewhere, that many die by the hour of preventable causes because rich people who could spare the necessary nickel
don't take the trouble to notice. Out in the real world, you'll see how dangerous it is for us to believe ourselves to be better, to be more precious, than any other nationality. We face great risk when others see us as swaggering bullies. Among the scary reports I've seen is one from Lombok, a lovely island near Bali in Indonesia. Bali is Hindu, and overrun by tourists. Lombok is Muslim and pristine. Two German tourists were beaten by Muslims who thought they were Americans. Had the attackers known they were Germans, they'd have been fine. What has Germany ever done to harm humankind? Had they been Jews, even lapsed anti-Zionist Reform Jews from Arizona with a deep respect for real Islam, the story might have been longer.
Remember this:
Love your country, sure, but keep in mind it is only a geographic entity based on ideals and concepts. More important, love your species. Understand who else shares your planet, and respect their ideas. For some, religion is not an off-and-on identity but rather a code of life that outweighs everything else. Find a way to help poor people in other cultures raise their children with dignity, enough food to live on, clean water, basic health. Do not overestimate your own worth, or your nation's power.
Just picture a few rich families living behind walls in a poor neighborhood in a society where the gap between the two widens by the year. If the rich help the poor ones for the right human reasons, that's best. If they help purely for their own self-interest, that at least achieves the same result. If they don't help, for either reason, they will not survive. And the longer they wait to help, the greater the calamity when it comes.
Finally, remember that however proud one might feel about being American,
that does not translate to any special privilege. We don't each, in the eyes of others, automatically get a bigger piece of cake. I always cringe at those songs that call the United States the only free country on earth. There are lots of others, and some--in a real, practical sense--are freer. And all countries are peopled by human beings made exactly the way we are. We might be freer than some, and richer than most, but we're not better than any.
Stripped to the basics, we're like everyone else. We want an honorable, healthy life for our children. We want to close our doors at night with an expectation of peace until the morning. Above all, we want human dignity. If we do not do all we can to make these goals possible for other peoples --whatever their spiritual makeup--we cannot expect to achieve them for ourselves. September 11, I fear, was an introductory statement. More will follow.
Be wise, be strong, be compassionate. With wisdom, strength and compassion--and a litte luck--we'll all end up with a better world.
With love,
Uncle Mort
-----------------------------------
Also, the following image is on my desktop, thought I'd share it with you. It's a cover from a NY Times Magazine right after Sept. 11, a proposal by a New York artist for a memorial at Ground Zero.
<img src="http://forums.techguy.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=269111">
A few days back, someone sent me the following text, written by a friend who is also a reporter for the AP, stationed in Quetta. I was struck by it, and sent out a big e-mail to friends and strangers (and I'm not the forwarding type) with the text attached. It stirred up some interesting reactions, and most of the people to whom it was sent are a little more, er, calm than this forum's regular posters. So, I thought I'd put it here and see what you all thought.
I will repeat what I said in my e-mail at the time: I think this is something every American should read. If you agree with me, please help see that they do.
---------------------------------------
To whomever happens across these reflections:
This is a letter from a gray-beard American foreign correspondent sitting near the Afghan border waiting for Islamic zealots to grant him permission to go see damage wrought by U.S. zealots on destitute people caught between the two.
It is for family and friends and, more specifically, to be put aside for my young grandnephews and nieces, a growing crop of amazing personhood. I know that none of the intended recipients would mind sharing the contents, which are thoughts on what I've learned in 30 years of watching us get into this mess. But I emphasize: this is my view and does not engage my employer in any way.
We are deep in the poo, and we dug the pit ourselves. Unless we very carefully extract ourselves, the world you kids find will be vastly different, and a great deal less pleasant than the one your parents knew. With wisdom and patience, we can end up making things better for everyone.
Because too many of us were selfish and dumb, we Americans squandered the gift of being able to walk freely and proudly through a great, wide world. For all our good qualities, we ignored the one requisite for survival on a disparate planet: the ability to see things from someone else's perspective. So now a small number of disturbed but cunning people can use this against us, just as a 97-pound weakling who knows his martial arts can, in the right circumstances, flip a 900-pound gorilla onto its tush.
Let's say our weakling meets his gorilla after it has, for decades, pissed off most other animals in the jungle. The poor ape meant well; he even thought he was loved for his generosity. Strong animals supported him for their own reasons. But weaker and far more numerous animals resented what they saw as spotty, self-directed token help, the occasional toss of a banana in the face of great hunger.
The gorillas only hope is to go against its nature. Rather than pound its chest and bellow and fling its arms, it has to reflect on why the 97-pound weakling has so much backing from so many poor souls in so many places.
Now, let's make our gorilla into a guerrilla, a holy warrior such as Osama bin Laden. Never mind what we think he is. Let's, for a change, look at things from someone else's perspective. If we kill him without convincing public evidence of guilt, we make him a martyr, adding infinitely to his symbolic power. If we make lots of noise in going after him, and then fail, we add to his real power and humiliate ourselves to impotence in the process.
Our problem, in any case, is not crushing bin Laden and his network. In a world of six billion, there are going to be dangerous loonies. Fact of life, like earthquakes and oil spills. And let's get real here. Even if we had had the most stringent controls of Stalinist Russia, updated with modern technology, we couldnt have prevented the WTC assault--at least not the first one. Hijackers used box cutters, for God's sake. Next it'll be origami knives torn from a holy text. Their target was 90 seconds off a flight corridor. Fighters can't scramble that fast.
Our real challenge is finding a way to channel the pitifully small amount necessary into other countries--schools, child health clinics, water catchment areas, farm roads...all that boring stuff that went out of fashion decades ago. We boast about our generosity. Foreign aid totals about 7 billion dollars a year. If you subtract what goes back to American contractors, what is stolen because of lousy controls, what goes into military crap and perks to win political friends, what is left for real foreign aid probably amounts to the cost of spoiled unsold hotdogs tossed out after a baseball season.
It's painful to watch Tomahawk missiles slamming into harmless mud buildings when you think that the cost of each one could educate a South Asian village for decades. Beyond that 7 billion, there is all the emergency aid we pour into disaster relief. But thats another story. It would cost a lot less to avoid the disasters, thus sparing unbelievable amounts of misery no amount of aid can undo.
The bombing goes on, as much a product of our helpless frustration as a means of pursuing strategic goals. We have killed uncounted infants, children, women in shapeless sacks who are not, in any case, permitted to have political/religious views. What little of Kabul and Kandahar was left after decades of mayhem is now even farther beyond repair. When you figure the cost, counting all those steak dinners and video movies sent to pilots on Diego Garcia and ships at sea, that's a lot of books and school lunches.
However complicated the Washington lifers try to make it, it is dead simple. Nationality does not define people. We're all human. Educate a kid, and hell be a lot less likely to listen to lunatics like bin Laden. Of course, we missed a generation, so put this down to long term. Now we have a short-term calamity to confront. Easy enough. Whats terrorism? The sowing of fear among fearful people. We used to have wise presidents, not slick ones, guys who said things like, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Exactly. September 11 was a horrible black day. But the world has seen others and survived. When something like that happens, and it may again, it is absolutely crucial to understand it for exactly what it was--a single, criminal act--and not make it worse by giving up our freedoms, our way of life, our concept of humanity, our basic dignity.
Take this anthrax thing. Very scary. But mailings to selected victims should not send a brave nation of a quarter billion people screaming to their drug stores for Cipro. For whoever does this, the point is not
to give some unlucky people anthrax. It is to empty the Capitol, to stop, to make sane people afraid of their own mailboxes. So far, they're winning.
Did someone suggest you get a gas mask? I mean, really. . .
Try this. Borrow someone else's mask, put it on, and look in the mirror. Then, with all that rubber covering your face, try to sing: "The home of the brave, and the land of the free."
We must learn perspective. We have no lock on love and grief. A mother in Papua or Palestine does not love her kids less than a mother in our American heartland. We mourn 6,000, suddenly lost at once in an act of senseless, cruel murder. Elsewhere, that many die by the hour of preventable causes because rich people who could spare the necessary nickel
don't take the trouble to notice. Out in the real world, you'll see how dangerous it is for us to believe ourselves to be better, to be more precious, than any other nationality. We face great risk when others see us as swaggering bullies. Among the scary reports I've seen is one from Lombok, a lovely island near Bali in Indonesia. Bali is Hindu, and overrun by tourists. Lombok is Muslim and pristine. Two German tourists were beaten by Muslims who thought they were Americans. Had the attackers known they were Germans, they'd have been fine. What has Germany ever done to harm humankind? Had they been Jews, even lapsed anti-Zionist Reform Jews from Arizona with a deep respect for real Islam, the story might have been longer.
Remember this:
Love your country, sure, but keep in mind it is only a geographic entity based on ideals and concepts. More important, love your species. Understand who else shares your planet, and respect their ideas. For some, religion is not an off-and-on identity but rather a code of life that outweighs everything else. Find a way to help poor people in other cultures raise their children with dignity, enough food to live on, clean water, basic health. Do not overestimate your own worth, or your nation's power.
Just picture a few rich families living behind walls in a poor neighborhood in a society where the gap between the two widens by the year. If the rich help the poor ones for the right human reasons, that's best. If they help purely for their own self-interest, that at least achieves the same result. If they don't help, for either reason, they will not survive. And the longer they wait to help, the greater the calamity when it comes.
Finally, remember that however proud one might feel about being American,
that does not translate to any special privilege. We don't each, in the eyes of others, automatically get a bigger piece of cake. I always cringe at those songs that call the United States the only free country on earth. There are lots of others, and some--in a real, practical sense--are freer. And all countries are peopled by human beings made exactly the way we are. We might be freer than some, and richer than most, but we're not better than any.
Stripped to the basics, we're like everyone else. We want an honorable, healthy life for our children. We want to close our doors at night with an expectation of peace until the morning. Above all, we want human dignity. If we do not do all we can to make these goals possible for other peoples --whatever their spiritual makeup--we cannot expect to achieve them for ourselves. September 11, I fear, was an introductory statement. More will follow.
Be wise, be strong, be compassionate. With wisdom, strength and compassion--and a litte luck--we'll all end up with a better world.
With love,
Uncle Mort
-----------------------------------
Also, the following image is on my desktop, thought I'd share it with you. It's a cover from a NY Times Magazine right after Sept. 11, a proposal by a New York artist for a memorial at Ground Zero.
<img src="http://forums.techguy.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=269111">
