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Monday, October 8, 2001
Okay, a third 
| | Got a couple minutes here in the room with a halfway reliable dial-up to L.A. before I go back out. That's just enough time to point to Insight and Foresight, a piece in today's L.A. Times by Tim Rutten. It notes prescient observations about the current war in David Halberstam's book War in a Time of Peace, about foreign policy in the '80s. What struck me most, however, was something Halberstam said just recently: |
| | "I keep thinking of those firemen at the World Trade Center," mused Halberstam, a longtime Manhattan resident. "In Vietnam, I saw extraordinary acts of heroism by men carrying their stricken buddies from harm's way. But those firemen went willingly--eagerly, in fact,--into that inferno for the sake of perfect strangers. That's something we haven't seen--at least, not on that scale--for a very long time here," said Halberstam... |
| | So perhaps the real news here isn't the war. Perhaps it's all the selfless kindness. Stuff people do without expectation of return. Stuff that's deeply moral yet cannot be described in the language of exchange we so often use to express morality — especially the applied form we call justice. |
| | The real news here isn't about paying back or paying forward or what anybody owes to anybody. It's about what makes us most human. Its about real goodness. |
| | That's why, since September 11, when we look for emblematic heroes, we turn to the firefighters and rescue workers and police officers who died in the World Trade Center. They didn't do it just for America, or their families, or even their brothers and sisters in uniform, though they certainly did it for all those reasons. |
| | Nor ordinary love, but the deepest kind: love of strangers. |
| | And man, I gotta tell you: that is so New York. |
| | New York: Our City of Strangers. |
| | It's not so far from Ellis Island to the World Trade Center. |
| | Or to the Statue of Liberty. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free. |
| | They're all gathered around the safest, most welcoming harbor the world has ever known. |
| | Eighty nationalities died in New York on September 11. Many wore the uniforms of helpers. |
Here's another
| | Thanks to Lance for pointing at Tony Blair's speech, which does an outstanding job of outlining the reasons for going to war against the Taliban and terrorism in general. |
| | It also fits the format of the Fairy Tale of the Just War (scroll down to the indented paragraph) that George Lakoff described on the occasion of the Gulf War, but which has been the format of war rationalization for as long as human beings have felt wronged by others. |
| | Again, I'm not knocking anything Tony says. It's flat-out brilliant. It's hard, even for a peace-monger like me, to disagree with any of it. I'm simply urging us to think deeply about the stuff that does our thinking for us. Because that's what stories are for. |
Okay, that's one
| | Craig says he guesses I'll blog at least five times today, in spite of my first post below (actually written late yesterday here in California, because I operate the blog on East Coast time). |
| | This reminds me of the story about Calvin Coolidge, also known as "Silent Cal." At a dinner party a woman said to him, "I bet someone I could get you to say more than two words." His reply: "You lose." |
Reality strikes again
| | I'm at a very nice hotel in San Diego with very noisy phone lines and no Ethernet. So it's taken me an hour dialing repeatedly into local and long distance numbers of two ISPs, and I can't get on the Net at better than 28.8kbps (right now I'm at 19.2), if I even get on at all. Which is a short way of saying it really is gonna be slow going for the next two days. |
| | So blog amongst yourselves. I'll catch up later. |
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