From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Sep 17 2001 - 01:44:30 MDT
At 01:16 AM 9/17/01 EDT, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>In reference to your comment:
[>> I was appalled by the terrorist atrocities. But I am
>> nearly in despair at the responses of many people I
>> expected so much better of.]
>Damien when it happens in Sidney, then you'll know.
It's not necessary to wait for that, Mitch. You think we don't feel it too?
It's possible that more people per capita in Australia watched the
unfolding horror in real time than in the States, because it happened here
late at night and all our broadcast TV channels immediately went saturation
with feeds from CNN, ABC etc. You think we don't care? I do more business
with people, some of them old friends, in New York than in Melbourne or
Sydney. The world might not yet be a global village (I don't shed many
tears when a million people die in Bangladesh during a flood, and I doubt
you do either), but Australia is in effect an offshore island of the USA.
We watch your television, eat your junk food, dress in your clothing, read
your books... And the reaction in Melbourne as well as Sydney, to judge
from the vox pop of radio talkback programs, was every bit as furious and
unreflective as the worst I'd expect to hear from the USA. `Nuke the filthy
towelheads, bomb them back to the stone age, those dirty moslems, they
cause trouble everywhere they go...' So far, however, the worst that I
expected to hear from the USA has appeared in several posts on this list of
people avowedly devoted to reason and enhanced future--since in my view
it's worse, for example, to ponder genocide as a policy option than to
believe in the Face of Satan in the smoke of the burning towers, worse than
explaining the tragedy as God's wrath on the homosexuals and abortionists,
loathsome though those were.
Damien Broderick
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