[Hotfoot]

This is from an e-mail I sent a friend on the subject. Perhaps it can help a little here...

quote:

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Here's my current stance on things:
The attack was a horrible thing. To compare it to something else simply
degrades both events (Pearl Harbor, JFK, Oklahoma City) but sometimes it's
the only way to convey even a fraction of what's happened to someone who has
no other point of reference. What happened was that there was a
well-planned, well-executed, deliberate strike against the nation made by
Terrorists. These people want to instill terror into us (meaning simply
anyone who was affected, shocked, horrified by this event) and make us react
to them. It's an old lesson with a new spin, make your enemy react instead
of act, and you have won the battle. If we lash out blindly in anger,
they've won. If we give in to hate, they've won. People died all this week
because one vital thing was forgotten, we are all human. The terrorists on
the planes were human. They might not have been good people, or likeable
people, but they were still people. The people dancing in the streets in
the middle east are still people. The people who died in the plane crashes
are still people, not angels, saints, or demons. People. Humans. Able to
make their own decisions and their own mistakes, they are still humans, even
if we hate the results of those choices.

The terrorists, the people dancing in the streets, they can't very well
think of us as people. They've learned to hate us as enemies, as monsters.
They're willing to kill other people who have done nothing to them at all,
because they think that all of us are the same. They have forgotten that we
are human, it's an easy thing to forget when all you have been taught is
anger and hatred.

The people who are attacking innocent Arab-Americans are humans as well.
Humans blinded by anger, fear, hatred, and shock. They have forgotten that
the people they are hurting are human as well. Just as America forgot
during World War II that Japanese-Americans were human.

The people who want to kill the terrorists and the people dancing in the
streets have forgotten that those people are human as well. Will they feel
better about killing the humans who danced in the streets? Would they dance
in the streets if those people were dead? We can't just kill people for
being happy, even if they are feeling happy about something which to us is
tragic. They have forgotten we are human. We are the enemy to them. We
need to prove to them that we are human, not just the enemy.

The perpetrators of these actions should be brought to justice. Justice is
not vengeance. It is not revenge. It is not slaughtering the people
responsible in the most gruesome ways possible. It is not hate. Hate is
what created this, and continuing to hate will simply drag it out for
generations. I'm not saying we should love the people who did this, but we
have to remember that they are still human, even if they don't.

They want us to sink to their level, to forget that they are human and
respond accordingly. If we forget that these people were human, they will
be vindicated, and even more terrorists will spring up to replace those that
we would kill.

It's not a case of who did what first. That doesn't matter. The people
that started this are long since dead, only leaving behind a few chapters in
the history books. For all we know all this started when someone ate the
Last candy apple at the party in the beginning of the universe. I can't
answer for any raping and pillaging my Nordic ancestors might have done
centuries ago, and I shouldn't have to. I can't answer for the Inquisition,
or the Crusades, I can't answer for the actions of the Romans or the Gauls
or the Celts. I can't speak for the Neolithic man who killed a bear to
protect himself. How am I supposed to be responsible for the actions of my
father or my father's father before I was born? No one should be expected
to bear the weight of history on their shoulders, and to ask any one member
of a nation to answer for that nation's actions is ludicrious. We have to
past to reflect on, the present to act, and the future to dream. We can
only affect the now. That's all we could ever do. And what might seem
right to some people now could seem horrendous to our progeny in the future,
when the future is now. But they can't change what happened, they can only
learn and move on.

It's time to learn that every person alive is a human being, not a monster,
not a demon, not an angel, not a saint. Just something in between with the
ability to make choices and decisions, both good and bad.

If we lash out in anger, rage, fear, or terror, then the people who have
died this week have been the winning blow for the terrorists that did this.
We will have lost. It won't matter how many more die, the outcome has been
decided, and well will be what it is that we claim so much to hate.

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Make of it what you will.