NP: Required REading for Anyone Who Has A Heart

[Toby G Levy]

File under P for Plight of the Preterite...

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020211&s=zinn

The Others
by HOWARD ZINN

Every day for several months, the New York Times did what should always
be done when a tragedy is summed up in a statistic: It gave us miniature
portraits of the human beings who died on September 11--their names,
photos, glimmers of their personalities, their idiosyncrasies, how
friends and loved ones remember them.

As the director of the New-York Historical Society said: "The peculiar
genius of it was to put a human face on numbers that are unimaginable to
most of us.... It's so obvious that every one of them was a person who
deserved to live a full and successful and happy life. You see what was
lost."

I was deeply moved, reading those intimate sketches--"A Poet of
Bensonhurst...A Friend, A Sister...Someone to Lean On...Laughter, Win or
Lose..." I thought: Those who celebrated the grisly deaths of the people
in the twin towers and the Pentagon as a blow to symbols of American
dominance in the world--what if, instead of symbols, they could see, up
close, the faces of those who lost their lives? I wonder if they would
have second thoughts, second feelings.

Then it occurred to me: What if all those Americans who declare their
support for Bush's "war on terrorism" could see, instead of those elusive
symbols--Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda--the real human beings who have died
under our bombs? I do believe they would have second thoughts.

[...]

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