eXpress Yourself newZletter Vol 2001 No. 5CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
The Sleeping Giant Awakes
--- Gone are our days of innocence and invulnerability
The Case For Rage and Retribution
--- Excerpts from Lance Morrow's Time editorial
Surviving What We Have Lost
--- Initiating the process of mourning and grieving
A Letter To The Terrorists
--- From the pen of Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Hello Again.
I trust this 2001 fall edition of your eXpress Yourself newZletter will prompt you to think and feel deeply about the agonizing consequences from the terrorist attacks on the United States.
This newsletter's mission is to build stronger, more compassionate human relationships around a new critical consciousness grounded in genuine dialogue, rising above the prejudice of closed minds, and honoring the integrity and dignity of each person's true voice of self expression.
In light of the hatred that precipitated acts of terrorism against the United States that took more than 6,000 lives, one has to wonder if there is any hope for genuine dialogue between and among the world's people.
But I sincerely believe we CAN heal our badly bruised planet, one authentic voice at a time. In the aftermath of what may be the most despicable act of terrorism in the annals of humankind, I still believe in the power of individuals to heal this planet.
This is not just my idle hope. It now has become a global imperative for survival on Earth.
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THE SLEEPING GIANT AWAKES
"The promise of humankind is carried in a single tear."
If I believed our planet was badly bruised before, it certainly is more horribly bloodied now. On September 11, 2001, a sleeping giant received a mortal wound to its heart and soul, a blow that shattered its illusion of invulnerability and exposed the full rage of its pain and indignation for all the world to see.
That sleeping giant is the United States of America.
The giant had been jostled before, poked in the eye, kicked in the stomach. An embassy burned here. A barracks bombed there. It grunted, growled, bared its teeth ... yet never rose to full indignation. Perhaps the giant still believed conflicts could be resolved with minimal carnage, preferring the bloodless and somewhat more sanitary retaliations of economic sanctions.
But two hours on Tuesday morning, September 11th changed the United States and the world ... forever. It was the bloodiest day on American soil since our Civil War in the 1860s.
America's silent tears and ruthless outrage mark the end of its illusions. The giant's pain and fury spoke to all people around the world who have suffered unconscionable acts of terrorism. The words were clear --- the sleeping giant sleeps no more.
If I ever believed there was a clarion call for decisions and actions shaped by the process of critical consciousness, it is truly NOW, perhaps more than any other time in world history. For how this awakened giant intends to exact retribution, justice and punishment for the blood spilled on its soil will be a roar heard around the globe.
Before one shot is fired .... before one military repercussion is heard ... all Americans must ask, Have we allowed ourselves to embrace the full measure of our loss and pain? Can we turn our justifiable rage into wisdom or will our actions be knee-jerk responses to a retaliatory mind set that promotes the following resolutions:
"Nuke the bastards!" (Presumably, the author of this quote knows precisely which bastards should be nuked.)
"The only good Arab is a dead Arab." (Here's an excellent case study on racial profiling.)
We have announced a war against terrorism. A noble option for a nation as much a warrior as a peacekeeper. But before we engage in battle, do we really know our enemy? True warriors never go into battle without knowing every intimate nuance of the enemy. So I ask, do we know our enemy? I don't mean knowledge acquired only from military briefings and intelligence reports. I mean do we intimately understand how this enemy thinks and feels.
In the aftermath of the insidious attack on the United States, it would be understandable to dismiss this enemy as having no feelings. But this enemy's feelings are no less intense or passionate than the feelings that now motivate us to wage war against it. Can we hate with equal intensity and ferocity as this enemy hates the United States? Can we sustain such hatred over the many grueling years it will take to achieve our stated objective? Can we think as this enemy thinks. Can we be as murderous in our strikes as this enemy will be with his? To paraphrase the wisdom of Sherlock Holmes, only the most brilliant minds can conceive such diabolical plots.
Will we fight a war as war and not as rhetorical or political posturing? More than 100 years ago, General Sherman said, War is hell. If we choose war, then let us be absolute in our resolve with no apologies for its costs, consequences and innocent casualties. We must never again sanitize guerrilla warfare. It has no pretty face. Vietnam taught us that.
I believe this enemy is unlike any the United States has met before. This enemy is without boundaries. It is without ethics as defined by people living in freedom-loving democracies. This enemy is a network of charismatic (yes, charismatic for their abilities to arouse and unify) megalomaniacs whose agendas often are justified by intractable religious convictions, then mixed with convoluted political and social referendums. This is the stuff of terrorism and it's a volatile brew, one the United States repeatedly has difficulty understanding to its fullest measure.
Sadly, human history has more than enough evidence to show there is nothing more dangerous than a religious conviction, particularly one that breeds hatred, then sanctifies violence to achieve apocalyptic extermination of anything or anyone who opposes its dogmatic myopia.
How does one "combat" an enemy who believes life is misery and death a redemption?
Considering the profile of this enemy, I speak with absolute urgency when I say this is not the time to lead from our zippers or shoot from the hip. Nor is it a time for egotistical polemics and tedious rhetoric. It is the time to engage the process of critical consciousness.
Act we must ... but let us be absolutely certain our actions come from reasoning and rational thought ... and not from unadulterated revenge.
Critical consciousness begins with reflection, connecting the head and the heart, combining both the power of feelings and the power of objective thinking in shaping a course of action. Through critical consciousness, we can transform rage into wisdom. And the first step in this process is to deeply feel and express our rage and grief.
Americans have suffered a horrendous loss. For some, that loss is the death of loved ones whose bodies may never be seen again except in memory. (It is almost impossible to embrace the magnitude of such pain.) For all Americans, we have lost, if not our innocence, then surely our naiveté that two oceans and two friendly nations, one to the north and one to the south, protected us from the fanaticism of any international criminal who believes killing innocent people isn't murder, but access to heaven.
Americans need to express their rage (see next article). But we also must embrace and express our grief. Rage and grief. They are the indelible marks of our humanity. They are the twin emotions that distinguish civilized societies worldwide. Both must be expressed. Both must shape our decisions and actions. Because whatever retribution we exact from this new enemy ... be it military, economic, or political ... that retribution begins and ultimately ends with our tears.
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A CASE FOR RAGE AND RETRIBUTION
Excerpts from an editorial by Lance Morrow, Time Magazine Special Edition
September 11, 2001
For once, let's have no "grief counselors" standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn't feel better... A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage.
What's needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury --- a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation...
...Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. Americans need to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness -- and to relearn
why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred.As the bodies are counted, into the thousands and thousands, hatred will not, I think, be a difficult emotion to summon. Is the medicine too strong? Call it, rather, a wholesome and intelligent enmity -- the sort that impels even such a prosperous, messily tolerant organism as America to act. Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company.
...In war, enemies are enemies. You find them and put them out of business, on the sound principle that that's what they are trying to do to you. If what happened on Tuesday does not give Americans the political will needed to exterminate men like Osama bin Laden and those who conspire with them in evil mischief, then nothing ever will and we are in for a procession of black Tuesdays.
This was terrorism brought to near perfection as a dramatic form... It is important not to be transfixed.... America, in spasms of a few hours, became a changed country. It turned the corner, at last, out of the 1990s. The menu of American priorities was rearranged. What seemed important a few days ago (in the media at least) became instantly trivial.
...During World War II, John Kennedy wrote home to his parents from the Pacific. He remarked that Americans are at their best during very good times and very bad times; the in-between periods, he thought, cause them trouble. I'm not sure that is true. Good times sometimes have a tendency to make Americans squalid.
The worst times, as we see, separate the civilized of the world from the uncivilized. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started.
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SURVIVING WHAT WE HAVE LOST
Someone once wrote that great people have great flaws. One might also say great nations have great flaws that precipitate great tragedies. It's the flaws that make us human. It's the tragedies that offer the chance to reveal the "better angels of our nature."
The United States has suffered a tragedy equal to its greatness. Our horror over the resulting death and destruction was and remains visceral. Our loss is almost beyond comprehension. More than 6,000 mangled bodies lie beneath the rubble of what was once a twin symbol of the world's economic strength. How do we express such excruciating loss? How do we mourn and grieve what will be no more?
There is an age-old process to surviving loss ... whether it's the loss of life or the loss of innocence. The process has three stages and how long we stay in each stage is determined by our own emotional clock. No one can tell us how to mourn. No one can set a timer on the extent of our feelings.
Nevertheless, the process provides a framework that offers a sense of order and recovery at a time when so much of what we once held sacred and dear is dead or in ruins. Believe it or not, most of us, as individuals and as a country, have already experienced two of the three stages.
Stage One: Shock and Denial
Stage Two: Anger and Depression
Stage Three: Understanding and AcceptanceSurvival is a learned skill. One of the best survival handbooks for learning this skill is "How to Survive the Loss of a Love" by Melba Colgrove, Harold Bloomfield and Peter McWilliams. The following are a few instructive insights from the pages of this book. May they help all of us find ways to express our grief so we might each, in our own time, move through our shared pain and become stronger, more resilient human beings.
1. Recognize The Loss
Perhaps the worse thing one could do is dismiss what has been lost as a bad dream, and once the rubble is removed, life will be normal again. Shock and/or emotional numbness is
to be expected. Indeed, both are part of the recovery process. But to become stuck in denial paralyzes our ability to mourn.2. Be With The Pain
Admit you are hurting. Although you may be frightened by it, be with your pain. Feel it. Lean into it. You will not find it bottomless. Above all, do not block your pain ... don't deny it or run away from it. It's real. Acknowledge what you feel.3. You Are Not Alone
Loss is a part of life, of being alive, of being human. As mundane as it sounds, we all have endured loss at some time in your lives. So don't be afraid or embarrassed to ask for help. There are no gold stars given for going it alone. Call or visit friends. Mobilize friends and family into a support system. Remember, an emotional wound is as real and painful as a physical wound. It's just not always as visible.4. Give Yourself Time
Mourning, grieving and healing take time. The more catastrophic the loss, the greater the length of time. It's hard for many of us to accept the fact something takes time in an age of fast foods and instantly replaceable everything. But loss requires time to heal. Allow yourself enough time to embrace and express what you deeply feel.5. It's OK To Feel Anger
Feel your anger. Express your rage. It's OK to feel anger toward the person you have lost, or the person who took something or someone away, or the social conventions or customs that contributed to your loss. It's NOT OK to hate yourself or act upon your anger in a destructive way. Channel your expressed anger into harmless, but helpful ways like a healthy primal scream, a cathartic crying session, a session with a punching bag, or playing the piano at double fortissimo. Anger is the fire that burns away inertia and clears a path toward more innovative and constructive action.In conclusion, let me add a peripheral thought to this sharing on surviving loss and pain. If any point was indelibly delivered by the unexpected and brutal acts of terrorism the world has just witnessed it is this:
Live today fully. Love fully. Be at peace fully. Trite though it
may sound, today is all we have. No one is able to guarantee a tomorrow. No one is immune to the unexpected. Live each day so each hour has meaning to you. When you retire for the night, be grateful for all your blessings, particularly the simplest but most profound blessing of your gift of life.Living fully is not dependent upon wealth or power, status or celebrity. Living fully means you deeply appreciate every hour for what it brings. Live fully each day and should any tragedy, even one as horrific as the events of September 11th, tear your life asunder, you will know you have lived fully and loved everyone and everything that was precious to you.
To put this another way, use that good china, the set you saved for special occasions. What could be more special that each day lived fully?
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A LETTER TO THE TERRORISTS
The following letter was written by columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. and published in the Miami Herald on Wednesday, September 12, 2001. Since then, it has been circulating through emails and read over the airwaves. For those who haven't seen or heard this letter, here it is:
It's my job to have something to say. They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.
You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard. What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward's attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that you failed.
Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.
Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.
Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.
Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family torn by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless.
We're frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae -- a singer's revealing dress, a ball team's misfortune, a cartoon mouse.
We're wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement.
We are fundamentally decent, though -- peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just, loving God.
Some people -- you, perhaps -- think that any or all of this makes us weak.
You're mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.
Yes, we're in pain now. We are in mourning and we are in shock ... Both in terms of the awful scope of their ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, probably, the history of the world. You've bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.
But there's a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall. This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain.
When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length in the pursuit of justice.
I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future. In the days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again...
We'll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined...
As Americans, we will weep. As Americans, we will mourn.
And as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Thus ends your 2001 fall eXpress Yourself newZletter. May our prayers and unselfish acts of giving touch those in pain and ease the anguish and suffering we all share at this difficult time. Finally, may these terrible events make us all the more aware of our infinite capacity for love, joy and compassion.
Thanks for sharing these moments with me.
God bless us, every one.
Prudence Kohl
Author and Photographer, "Hole in the Garden Wall"
http://www.withinwithout.comKohlQuest Associates
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