Leo Casey's statement

[RE]

I would imagine most people here are taking their shock and horror to their nonvirtual friends.  Here people are trying to think about this horror, as they should.  Inevitably, some of the thinking is more driven by counterdepressive motives, and might look obsessive and detached.  Also, some of it is an attempt to avoid getting drawn into a mandated vortex of outrage over "Evil attacks on freedom/our way of life/basic American institutions," and all the other mischaracterizations in the dominant media that amazingly obscure any links to the Israel/Palestine background, which thereby becomes "unspeakable."  I think we're faced with the aporia -- I think that's the word -- of having to acknowledge that the people who did this must be stopped, and at the same time that some of the motives of their actions can't be regarded as "insane" or "monstrous," that they reflect human misery and suffering, and that any attempt to try to address what is happening in the Mideast will have to somehow reflect this aporia by not angrily dismissing those motives.

Are you, Leo, pleading for something like a moment of silence, or a period of grief, before we try to make sense of this?
re

  ----- Original Message ----- 

  From: LeoCasey at aol.com 

  To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com 

  Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 11:22 AM

  Subject: (no subject)

  I have alternating feelings of incredible depression and barely controllable 

  rage when I read some of the post-WTC e-mails to this list. Are folks so 

  removed from simple sentiments of human compassion, much less feelings of 

  human solidarity, that in the face of thousands of innocent human lives 

  destroyed, they can do nothing more than spin justifications for such mass 

  murder, and even join in celebrations of it. How sad that you are so detached 

  from your humanity. How fucked that you think mass murder has anything to do 

  with human liberation and human freedom; you are prisoners of an ideology 

  that has lost all real touch with its purported ends. How pathetic that all 

  you can do is quarrel over how many thousands are dead, as if the escape of 

  intended victims makes this murder less of a crime. I feel no kinship 

  whatsoever with those of you who have posted these notes; you are the spin 

  masters of mass murder. 

  Leo Casey 

  United Federation of Teachers 

  260 Park Avenue South 

  New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) 

  Power concedes nothing without a demand. 

  It never has, and it never will. 

  If there is no struggle, there is no progress. 

  Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 

  want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 

  lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. 

  -- Frederick Douglass -- 

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