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To: oldirtybastard who wrote (13646)	9/15/2001 9:56:59 AM
From: AllansAlias	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 209892

I'm middle-aged now and routine is a comfort to me. I have always liked my Saturday mornings, my lazy easing into the day while my son sleeps upstairs his deep youthful sleep. People tell me that the world changed this week. The bay here is as beautiful as ever. What I was thankful for last week has not changed very much. Has the world changed? It would seem so, yet I am inclined to think that it has not changed very much. There is no doubt that life has changed for North Americans. Worldwide, the cycle of violence and hate is being ratcheted-up a notch, so I guess there has been incremental change on this global scale. Have things gotten any better or worse for the vast majority of the world outside the United States? The billions of people who toil every day will continue to toil and live in poverty and despair. America is the leader of the free world and that is an awesome responsibility. I pray for them. As a Canadian, I wonder how far we would go to help our American brothers before we might ask ourselves, as Canadians, if the actions being considered are too extreme. I can not ever recall such an outpouring of grief and solidarity as what I have seen these last few days. When we consider the atrocities and disasters of the last 50 years, it's a little confusing to me that we should only now be driven to such an outpouring. What makes it all the more shocking, and therefore requiring an equally profound emotional response, is that we live in the CNN age. We get to witness such an event from multiple camera angles -- the full horror brought to us as if it were directed or scripted. Add to this the nature of the crime -- passenger planes being used as missles. It is designed to strike fear in us and it works. If America is to lead us in the struggle against terrorism, then it is my opinion that the quality of their leadership must bear some minimal scrutiny. These are early days and I pray that they will lead us well, but I also fear that they will overreact and plunge us all into a cycle of violence that will threaten our way of life more effectively than the terrorists could never dream of. I warn us all that this is not a simple problem of good versus evil or Christianity versus Islam or whatever easy division you care to make. For my family to be protected, I need to stand up and ask some tough questions: 1) Why do these people hate America and the West? 2) What part does modern Western society play in the propagation of violence? (This relates to questions such as the training of bin Laden by the US when he was useful to us against the Russians or the sale of advanced US military hardware to questionable states.) 3) Does demonizing an entire culture or an entire religion serve any good purpose? Will it help? 4) How far are we willing to go to avenge 5,000 lives? Those who would answer "As far as it takes." need to calmly ask themselves whether or not vengeance will actually make their country a safer place. As many of you know by now, I think this is a very complex problem. If our goal is to stop terrorism, then we need to act within as much as without. Just reassuring ourselves that we are good and that we were harmed is not going to make our world a safer place. I ask myself the following: "What would we do if this terrible event were realized by people like McVeigh or, say, a European-based terrorist group such as we had in the 1970's and 1980's?" It's a thought experiment I know, but an instructive one in my opinion. People who are advocating the use of extreme violence as a response are threatening everything we believe in. Their advice has no moral foundation and it is impractical, both from a military point of view and in terms of putting an end to terrorism. These people must not be allowed to carry the day. I don't know what the answers are, but I know we have to fight these people. More importantly, we have to fight what causes it. Make no mistake, we have to put all our resources at work to catch these people and bring them to justice, but we have to show some restraint in that effort because it is who we are. We must not ever become like them. There may well be yet more acts of terrorism in the coming months or years and they will try very hard to bring down our core values. This is their real target. Never! "Do the right thing." Yes.