Christopher:
Your comments are carefully crafted to be respectful, rather than discomforting, and I appreciate that. But I do not agree with them.
On LBO-Talk, we have read comments such as "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." That is not, by any measure I can see, a different level of abstraction of analysis, but a callous denigration of the crime visited upon us. The first words off of Chomsky's keyboard, that the bombing of an essentially empty factory in the Sudan [a single night watchman died] was a greater crime than the bombing of buildings with more than 50,000 people in them, is not a different level of abstraction, but a moral calculus that is so out of balance, and has lost such sight of actual human suffering, that it is a profound insult to the dead and suffering.
If there is some balance that needs to be restored in the account my letter provides of such matters, perhaps it is that I did not condemn them in strong enough terms.
And if, in the context of all that I said, some could think that allowing my daughters to put little American flags in our windows was a sign of jingoism, than I fear that we are so alienated from the nation in which we live, that we have lost all sense of proportion at this most critical time.
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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