Until then, here are two pieces of commentary.

Terrorism and the Four Freedoms
Doris Haddock
The following is a speech given by 91 year-old Doris "Granny D" Haddock, who walked across the U.S. in 1999-2000 for campaign finance reform, in Unity, Maine on September 22, 2001.

I have read an amazing amount of material over the last two and a half weeks but nothing puts it together, for me, as this 91 year old woman has. She has seen it all and isn't afraid to call it like it is. In the middle she quotes from an FDR speech.

Sixty years and eight months ago Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his "four freedoms" State of the Nation speech to Congress as he prepared the nation for war. In it, he laid down the sensible and humane preconditions for future world peace and democracy.

If Mr. Bush insists on preparing us for his war against evil, let him learn from that great speech.

She quotes from the end of his speech and contrasts Bush's actions to FDR's speech. It just makes you want to cry. Read it. It ends up with the following.

"The ultimate weakness of violence," Dr. King taught us, "is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

Terrorism makes it hard for us to do the right thing, but do it we must

Old "Fighting Bob" LaFollette, that great reformer, said that "war is the money-changer's opportunity, and the social reformer's doom." But we will not accept doom. We will keep going. It is a time for all of us to speak the truth with courage and hope. America is, despite all, still the best hope for the world. But we are a work in progress, and we all have some work to do right now. It is the work of peace, of frank education, of making our lives and our communities more sustainable and less dependent on the suffering of others, and of cleaning up a campaign finance system that has allowed our elected leaders to represent not our interests and values, but those of international corporations who are set on world domination and who have the resources to buy our government away from us if we will let them. We will not, so long as we live, and so long as our four freedoms are our guiding lights and inspiration
[read more, please]

thanks to Red Rock Eater Digest

I might add that I haven't seen anything on the web that has the quality of links to what is going on around us as Red Rock Eater Digest.

The following is a piece from the Guardian in the UK. [I find their reporting and commentary to be excellent.] The piece is written by a Turk, Orhan Pamuk. He is a writer with a very interesting book out - My Name is Red. The situation we find ourselves in has many facets. Here is another facet.

Listen to the damned
It is not Islam or poverty that succours terrorism, but the failure to be heard

Those who give unconditional backing to military attacks to demonstrate America's military strength and teach terrorists "a lesson", who cheerfully discuss on television where American planes will bomb as if playing a video game, should know that impulsive decisions to engage in war will aggravate the hostility towards the west felt by millions in Islamic countries and poverty-stricken regions. This gives rise to feelings of humiliation and inferiority. It is neither Islam nor even poverty itself directly that succours terrorists whose ferocity and creativity are unprecedented in human history, but the crushing humiliation that has infected third world countries like cancer.

Never has the gulf between rich and poor been so wide. It might be argued that the wealth of rich countries is their own achievement and does not concern the poor of the world, but never have the lives of the rich been so forcibly brought to the attention of the poor through television and Hollywood films.

Today, an ordinary citizen of a poor Muslim country without democracy, or a civil servant in a third world country or a former socialist republic struggling to make ends meet, is aware of how insubstantial an amount of the world's wealth falls to his share and that his living conditions, so much harsher than those of a westerner, condemn him to a much shorter life. At the same time, a corner of his mind senses that his poverty is the fault of his own folly, or that of his father and grandfather.
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