George,

I confess, I can be as defensive/bloodthirsty as the next person, but the Bush administration's response is so completely unreal, it feels like a new version of "Wag the Dog". Can't anyone rational look at the situation in Israel for the past 40+ years, and realize that although Israelis are killing 2 Palestinians for every Israeli murdered, the violence and terrorism hasn't stopped? Violence leads to violence. Or genocide. Period.

According to the experts, Osama Bin Laden's active hatred of us goes back to ... surprise! The Persian Gulf War, when we brought our ideas, our military and our culture violently into his homeland. Wonder how many more Bin Laden's we'll create if we bomb Afghanistan back into the stone age. The people of Afghanistan who do NOT support the repressive regime of the Taliban, in fact, they have been asking for our help for years as women are oppressed and slaughtered, intellectuals murdered, children brainwashed: they are the ones that will be killed by our military. Not the elite, the decision-makers, the government and it's allies. The innocent civilians, like the 1700 muslims among our civilians who died on 9/11, killed by the fanatics.

Why does our society encourage people to be motivated from fear and despair, rather than love and happiness?

Don't even get me started on the media's simplistic covering of *any* complex situation. They're treating this like the United States is a high-school football team: just changing coaches is sufficient to change the results of the "game", and there's the-bad-guy-in-the-black-hat guys, let's go stomp on him, rah rah rah. The polls showing the approval rating of Bush are also rather bizarre, since he hasn't really done much other than repeat the well-crafted statements of his conservative handlers. Why aren't they talking about who is feeding them all this spin? It worries me that they don't want us to know who is really making decisions for our people.

If it was that simple, wouldn't the world already be a "peaceful" place?

Yet this was an incredible, almost beyond comprehension, act of violence. And people do need to grieve. And try to prevent it in the future. Somehow, I doubt the immediate gratification acts of retribution suggested by the administration and promoted by the media are going to be sufficient. I know they will not wipe from my mind the images of people leaping from the 100th floor, or the recollections of my friend at the triage station hearing the "pop" of buried police ammo going off in the still-burning fires.

Real life is not Hollywood, and Rambo is not going to keep the bad guys from getting us again.

I, for one, have sat still and numb long enough since the fiasco last November. I intend to write handwritten notes to my reps informing them that I, as a tax-paying, law-abiding constituent, do NOT support military reprisals or a dramatic increase in defense spending (how about instead starting by paying the back UN dues the US owes?), and then I need to figure out what I can best do to help rational, responsible and liberal candidates get elected. I will also continue to remind everyone, every way possible, that not all muslims are murderers, and assuming that they are makes us no better than them.

Thanks again, George. This has been a week of utter horror, in many many ways.

Walk in beauty,

Nif Lindsay (electronic mail, September 24, 2001).