Re: a contrast of cultures, a contrast of men

From: Diane Hodges (dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 15 2001 - 08:13:41 PDT


...a ramble...

- i can only hope that we, here, as intelligent people, can make an effort
to understand and learn more than we think we know
right now about international security issues, foreign policies, and
international politics, histories, cultures, and so on.
it is too easy to assume we have the resources on-hand to "make sense" of
what has happened, and what will happen now...

"sleepers" are persons who live and travel in foreign countries, but who
are indebted to specific interest groups through religious sympathy, kinds
of coercion, and at times reluctant affiliations. it is not unusual for a
person's family to be used as perverse collateral when persuading someone
they have a duty to perform certain acts. as the hijackers' names and
identities are investigated, it seems many of these men are "sleepers."

as bill notes, and as one Iraqi scholar has also expressed, this was not
an attack on the US, but on the West, on capitalism, and the excesses that
pervade global consciousness with seductions of materialism and
individualism.

phillip capper has suggested that ending world poverty and oppression can
have an impact on terrorism, but in countries and states where their very
existence is premised on violence, such as Palestine or Israel, it is hard
to imagine how or where interventions might make a difference. ending
poverty requires a massive redistribution of resources... ending
oppressions are acts that might begin more usefully here in North America,
before launching out to save the world's peoples.

acting from an ethical position is important, but the current climate of
moral outrage makes this difficult as well.

all i know, right now, is that reality has changed, and there is no going
back to comfortable ideologies. it is a time of high anxiety, and no one
has the social or cultural resources, currently to cope - grief, loss,
fear, and rage, exhaustion, are spreading in unprecedented waves of effect
and affect.

my greatest fear, today, is for the thousands of Arab and Muslin civilians
who live in North America, and who are being attacked by angry American
who seek an enemy where there isn't one.

the jargon in our reservoirs - of imperialism, oppression, and so on - is
no longer sufficient for thinking about what has happened, and what is
happening. there is no good or evil here, no good guys and bad guys, and
the very idea of an enemy has been splintered with a new complexity.
i have never supported Americentricism, and have always agonized for the
ways innocent lives are sacrificed for the sake of ideological causes - i
have always feared the wrath or moral righteousness and ignorance.

my task now, and this what i choose because it is all i can do, is learn
as much as i can so that i have a way to think differently about
everything i thought i knew.

diane

   
  

************************************************************************************
"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a
cigarette in a gutter - all are stories. But which is the true story? That
I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard,
waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making
this note and then another, I do not cling to life."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.
                                                                          
     (...life clings to me...)
*************************************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
vancouver, bc
mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, montreal, qc, H9R 3Z2



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