World Trade Center Disaster--How Should America See It?

We live in Lower Manhattan, only blocks away from the horrible destruction of thousands of people in what was once the World Trade Center. As we write this, the smoke is still rising from the site and rescue workers are digging day and night.

We are writing because we do NOT want this tragedy to be used by our government to retaliate with revenge. The persons responsible must be punished, but we do not want the politicians or the press who are goading people on to a war in which innocent people will be killed, to succeed!

To prevent this we--as a nation, as individuals--need to stop and think: why are people in other lands so angry with the US? What attitude have we had to people in other nations? We now know, a little, what people we have bombed have felt--the fear, the terror, the grief. And unlike some of these countries, as yet our water supply is safe; we have food.

We cannot afford to meet this evil act with evil of our own. Everyone who loves this country needs to see what Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, writes in her commentary, "Urgent: How Should We See People?" (the full text is on the web, http://www.AestheticRealism.org):

"The first crucial issue for the United States now is the issue every individual person faces when he or she is hurt: Do you want to think more deeply at this time, or do you want to feel that you don't need to think and that since you've been hurt you have a right to do anything? The second choice has been so frequent. It is a form of contempt. And contempt, 'the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it,' Eli Siegel [the founder of Aesthetic Realism] showed, is the thing in people which has made for every cruelty there has ever been....

"There is another kind of seeing which must be now--…that needed seeing is good will, exact and critical. It begins with our trying to think about people this way: 'Here is a person. He or she is as real as I am. What does this person feel? What, as Mr. Siegel put it, does he or she "deserve by being a person"?... The people of the United States have to ask, …what should be the basis of the choices our nation makes, profits for corporations, or justice to human beings?" [The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known # 1485]

We stood on 6th Avenue with many, many others who cried in horror as we saw the flames and smoke shoot out of the second tower, with thousands of people still in it. For many days grieving people hung the pictures of loved ones on trees and on the chain link fence at Washington Square Park, hoping to find them. Firemen at the nearby fire station lost their lives because they were among the first to go to the rescue. We know that hundreds, thousands of New Yorkers DO NOT want more innocent people killed in "revenge"! That is not what America stands for.

If, as Ellen Reiss writes, we "meet contempt and ill will with contempt and ill will of our own...that will be met with more contempt and ill will--and there will be a horrible, deadly, unending contempt cycle." We cannot allow that! Whoever reads this article and feels as we do, tell your congressman, tell the media!

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Barbara Allen, educator, flutist, and Arnold Perey, Ph.D., anthropologist, are both Aesthetic Realism consultants and husband and wife, living and working in New York City.