United States Should Look Within For Causes

To the Editors:

With all respect for emotions, for compassionate solidarity and for personal ties involved in yesterday’s tragedy, I would urge that we place them aside for a moment in order to see the events in a perspective of thousands of years filled with millions of deaths.
This done, the constant news-channel heading, “America Under Attack,” becomes a little presumptuous, in light of an action which, if it cannot be condoned for its productive or constructive value, is clearly symbolic. This done, we uncover a symbol so carefully, brilliantly and powerfully articulated that it demands careful and brilliant listening: two planes were successfully hijacked and precisely hit the fucking towers within minutes of each other, both of which were soon reduced, in clouds of smoke, to rubble. The brilliance the horror, and that gives me enough respect for the horror to give it my ear... which is why I want to cry as I hear the redundant “What a tragedy, oh what a tragedy, let’s get ’em back, boys.”
Such an action cannot be commended for its usefulness in dismantling an economic system that calls for foreign policies that are perceived as extremely oppressive to many peoples (particularly, I assume here, to the perpetrators of the action); however, it is an understandable reaction to that system, a reaction to deeply unsatisfied frustration, and the connection between frustration and violence is no mystery. It wouldn’t be surprising, after 10 or 15 years of beating on a younger sibling, to come home one day and find him or her crouching behind the door with a fry pan ready to conk you on the head, totally regardless of what it might effect in you, and inspired mainly by kegged up emotions. Given our actions in the greater world over the past decades, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that somebody out there would want to take down the World Trade Center, and we can hardly call it uncalled for violence.
Fault lies not only with the perpetrators of the violence, but with the people (us! and many, if not all, the victims) who supported, profited from, allowed to exist, or otherwise reified the economic system which led to the anger which led to this violence.
What could the perpetrators of such violence hope to accomplish? Who can tell? As I see it, nothing can be accomplished by an act of violent destruction. However, something can be accomplished in the reception of and reaction to violence, a responsibility now in the hands of the Americans (us!). If I haven’t given myself away as a pacifist (and English major) by turning a violent action into a symbolic one, I should say now that I don’t fancy going to war anyplace, or harbor the illusion that we need to get anyone back. I think, if somebody did the tally, we’d have a lot more coming. But in response to the urgency of this violence I am further committed to dismantling the economic system and foreign policies which I believe lead to such violence.

–Solomon S.
College junior