The War Comes Home

The war that the United States has been waging against the nonwhite peoples of the world for over half a century came home yesterday.

Nothing does, nothing can, justify the brutal terror attack that may have killed thousands of innocent civilians. It is a crime against humanity of the highest order, and the sympathies of all right-thinking people must be with the families of the victims.

But we must understand what led to it, and draw the right lessons from it, or as Santayana suggested, we may be condemned to relive it.

Let us not pretend that this was the only harvest in history that was never sown.
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(Sept. 13. I sent a note to Helen to keep the following commentary up. It needed to be read. Her reply:

Well, I appreciate that. Thanks for such kind words.

No, the editorial is not going away. I squished it
into a narrow column, and plan to leave it on the
front page for as long as it keeps bringing in email
from the brain-dead bomb-em-to-hell people. You
wouldn't *believe* my in-box this morning. Your's
are the first kind comments I've gotten all day...)

(It's on the left side of the page}

Helen Highwater, Unknown News

One thing I haven't seen, despite plenty of switching from network to network, is anyone taking five seconds to ask why.

Why are people willing to kill and even die to express their anger at America? What has America done to provoke such a suicidal rage, one might wonder. The answer, like the question, is nowhere to be found in America's media coverage.

I have a theory: People do not decide to hijack and crash planes, obliterate skyscrapers, attack the Pentagon, and kill themselves in the process, on a whim. My guess is that they do it because they're angry -- angry as hell, and because peaceful protest is not allowed, or is allowed but accomplishes nothing.

Terrorism does not arise in a vacuum. "Violence is the language of the unheard," Rev. Martin Luther King once said. Is there something unheard in all this rubble?
(...)

Of course, I'm smoking a pipe dream here, offering a strategy straight from LaLaLand. America will "retaliate," Americans will feel pretty darn good about it, and the president's approval ratings will shoot up higher than 110 storeys. It all goes without saying, just like the reasons for terrorism go without saying -- meaning literally that the reasons can never be seriously discussed.

The agony thousands of American families are going through this morning will be repeated -- first in an Arab nation, and then, soon, in America again. What goes around comes around. Again and again and again.
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both thanks to BookNotes