<HTML> << Are you, Leo, pleading for something like a moment of silence, or a period of  grief, before we try to make sense of this? >> First we need to realize that a lot of us do not even know for whom we have to grieve yet. Max's story about his friend could be told by many of us, I fear. My immediate family is safe, and so too, a close friend who worked in WTC but happened to be away yesterday, but there are still others from whom I have not heard -- offices of a number of major education reform and teacher activists groups are very close to the WTC, and from what I can gather on the TV, the buildings which house them are severely damaged. One of my daughter's teachers broke into tears when she heard the news yesterday, as her husband was a firefighter. Is he one of the 300 missing firefighter, apparently killed trying to rescue people when the towers collapsed? I could go on: but the point is that we don't even know whom we have to grieve for yet, much less had the chance to begin grieving. If ever there was a need for some simple human compassion, and a virtual moment of silence, this would seem to be it. But what has deeply disturbed me about some of the discourse here -- and about the incredible comments I have received off-list -- is not about the desire to explain, to intellectualize, what happened; that is, in itself, a way of trying to cope and of trying to tame, the insanity of these deeds. Nor can I disagree with those who have rushed to talk about the need to defend civil liberties or to prevent vigilante attacks on Arab-Americans -- although neither has happened, and it seems strange that one should focus first on what might happen, as opposed to what has actually happened, although it seems so disproportionate to be concerned with a potential wrong against so great and grievous an actual wrong -- I still know that civil liberties must be protected, and that Arab-Americans must not be scapegoated for what appears, at this point, to be the work of bin Laden. Perhaps if those who wrote those e-mails thought a little, they would have given a moment until those who were still searching for lost friends had a moment of relief, or the start of a grieving process. But what is real offensive, so offensive I have difficulty finding the words for my rage about it, is the series of posts from the Heartfields, the Hanleys and the like which offer the intellectual equivalents of the celebrations of joy in the streets of Nablus. It is obscene beyond belief that they should foist upon us these justifications and explanations for mass murder as a blow against American imperialism at a time like this. It was bad enough that one has had to read from their keyboards the justifications for genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosova, but at least they did not visit them upon the Tutsis of Rwanda and the Muslims and Albanians of Bosnia and Kosova while they were in the midst of those crimes. And that they should do it in the name of human emancipation just shows how little they understand of emancipation, and the struggle for it. I share NOTHING with them. 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 -- </HTML>