to restore some sense of safety to them, how to ensure that they understood that it was not an ethnic group or a religion that was to blame for what happened [with a special concern for the Arab-American students], how to explain why someone would do this to other human beings [the most difficult thing my best explanation that a child can understand is that a very small group of 'bad' or 'evil' people did this], how to make it possible for children to contribute something to ease the pain of others, how to try to restore a sense of normalcy in the children's lives and school day as a way to make them feel safe.
I don't have a point of reference for this in my personal experience. What has been done to NYC in terms of the loss of human life and the people it is touching is like 20 years of the AIDS epidemic, carried out in a few dreadful hours, without the slightest chance for preparation on the part of those left behind.
I return to my office to read Heartfield talking about my "self-admitted rage," as a prelude to his rather weak rhetorical gesture to dismiss, as words of emotion, my condemnation of his obscene justification for mass murder. My rage here is a cold rage, coming directly from reading Heartfield's very first "thesis" on this topic: <<The people of the Middle East - if they are the perpetrators - have a right to fight back, and this was certainly an audacious blow against the imperialist heartland. >> At least Heartfield is true to form: thousands of New Yorkers, drawn from every part of the globe, now join the Tutsis of Rwanda, the Muslims of Bosnia and the Albanians of Kosova on the list of human beings which are mere grist for his ideological mill on LBO-Talk and elsewhere. Sitting pretty in complete comfort and safety in the original world imperial power, he can decide which innocent human lives are expendable on his ideological balance sheet of the right to strike "audacious!
blo ws" against the "imperialist heartland." He -- and those who parrot his complete ideological callousness to the loss of human life on so grand a scale -- are no comrades of mine in a struggle for a better world, for human emancipation, but ideologues that debase and disgrace that struggle by proclaiming that they wears its mantle.
And what, may I ask, are we supposed to make of Chomsky, when we read, as the first words out of his keyboard on this topic, that this crime -- with uncounted thousands dead -- does not carry the weight of the bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, which left one person dead [and was carried out at a time and in a way designed to minimize human casualties]? If this some sort of parody, somebody's idea of how to make Chomsky look like a complete and utter ideological fool, ready to go to any absurd length to make an argument minimizing the gravity of the thousands of bodies of innocent men, women and children which are entombed in a 10 square block grave in lower Manhattan? Who needs to discuss what he said about the Khymer Rouge or the holocaust deniers any more; this piece of blind ideological "reasoning" by itself makes him a figure lacking all credibility.
It seems like the left in the US and the UK and Canada has more than its share of suicide pilots who would like to take it down in one gigantic flame ball, destroying any last shred of credibility it might have as a movement of human emancipation.
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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