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Re: Thursday, September 13, 2001
i have appreciated your writings here, we have all lost something in these past few days even the three huge bombs only two miles from my house here in London are dwarfed in their horror by what the people living and working in NY have endured. It is refreshing to hear someone questioning the tone of the coverage and the vocabulary that is being used especially as you are an American. Young Americans on at least two occasions have told me that "the rest of the world is a fun place to visit after high-school" but that it is an old place and irrelevant. The unwillingness of many politicians from all over the world and particularly this week in the US to actually listen and try to understand even the stated reasons for the hatred felt toward the west cannot be right. An American senator on the BBC today refused to acknowledge that there had been ANY breach in the security systems of the United States and refuted even the suggestion! With these attitudes it seems to me easy to lapse into a military vocabulary learned, by many, from Hollywood and CNN not from killing-zones. IMO when people dislike countries they tend to mean they hate their governments - this is why the British say they "hate" the French but millions of us holiday there every year - they don't hate the French people at all. We in Britain are as tired of listening to our governments tell other countries how to live as we are of listening to America tell us how to live. The present incumbent of the white house is so closely attached to business and the military that the world is truly frightened and I don't just mean muslim fanatics. The manner of your President's election, although proved just, was deemed suspect and the world now watches an administration that they are told is "paying back to big-business" . The memory of the USA's recent display of democracy and the support by the USA and the group of 8 for so many non-democratic nations cannot be sustainable. You have re-confirmed my belief in the people of America - I just hope that your government returns and acts in a way befitting the courage of the people of New York and the memory of those that have been lost. greg ========================== Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg November 19 1863 There are responses to this message:
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