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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (43338)	9/11/2002 9:13:00 PM
From: kumar	Respond to of 281500

I buy the historical events/facts. I do not buy the rhetorics.

To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (43338)	9/12/2002 2:33:34 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

A nation changed - and unchanged By Derrick Z. Jackson Editorial The Boston Globe 9/11/2002 TODAY, AMERICANS are consumed with melancholy. Tomorrow, we will just consume. Today, we want the world to share in our loss and suffering. Tomorrow, we go back to exploiting the world, with questionable regard for suffering and minimal concern about the planet's degradation. Today, we will say how everything is changed forever. Tomorrow, we will defiantly demonstrate that we will not change. A year has not cured the schizophrenia exposed by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The United States remains two countries at the same time. One nation is joined in the permanent loss of invulnerability. Three thousand people, mostly ordinary people, were killed almost simultaneously and instantaneously by a network of madmen who turned tools of progress into weapons of mass destruction. There are things that are changed forever. The dead. Their families. The New York skyline. No matter one's personal politics, raw grief and rage will bond every American. Take any day of the New York Times ''Portraits of Grief'' series, which gave vignettes of the victims in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on the hijacked airliners. You could find someone with aspirations, hobbies, humor, skills, material passions, and spiritualities akin to your own, someone who in your own mind is as innocent as you are. The World Trade Center might have been targeted by the madmen as a symbol of heartless capitalism. But somewhere in that building, you could find someone close to your heart, close enough to chill your spine in imagining yourself in their place. We will be angry forever because a man in a beard and his heartless followers buried their lives in impenetrable dust. Because the United States happens to be Planet Earth's closest thing to a global economic and military empire, the world will be sending us its sympathies. No one wants to be seen as failing to please the king, especially after President Bush told the world right after the attacks, ''Either you're with us or you are with the terrorists.'' What is also painfully clear is that the other America, despite the traumatic evidence that it cannot insulate itself from global evil, continues to play the heartless CEO. President Bush wants the world to help round up the terrorists and wants the world to allow US soldiers to go to whichever cave we think Osama bin Laden is in. Bush wants the world to support us in a first-strike war on Iraq. Bush wants permission from the rest of the world to conduct an ''ad hoc and often unilateral pursuit'' of threats to the United States, as Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham put it this week. But we refuse to participate in the formation of a new International Criminal Court, ratified by 79 nations. We pulled out of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. We backed off on curtailing carbon dioxide emissions. We did not seriously participate in the world conference against racism. We withdrew from 30-year-old missile treaties. We just got done trying to stymie the World Summit on Sustainable Development from setting any measurable goals and timetables to cut pollution and poverty. We have watched millions of people die in genocides without barely lifting an eyelash. At around 5 percent of the world's population, we have done everything we can to keep a firm grip on the world's resources and could not care less about fouling the planet with a quarter of the greenhouse emissions. Sales of Chevrolet Suburbans last month were double those of August 2001, helping General Motors sell a record number of sport utility vehicles. Suburbans get about 13 miles per gallon of gasoline. A current major beer commercial has young adults bragging about eating too much as 2 billion people on Earth have no clean water. Sept. 11 did nothing to stop our flaunting of excess. Do not read into this in any way that our retrograde, inward policies made the 3,000 victims any less innocent than they were or that crime committed against them had the least bit of legitimacy. But the United States is playing with global fire by demanding that our dead be viewed by the world as pure innocents when we write off the thousands of innocent civilians we have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade (and presumably would kill in a new war in Iraq) as mere ''collateral damage.'' It is playing with fire when we continue to rub our consumption in the world's face. Sept. 11 brought the United States into the world of unsuspected bombing and terror. The world for the most part has joined the United States in going after the terrorists. For all this asking and demanding of help, it might be a good idea for the United States to join the world. ___________________________________________________ Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 9/11/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com