From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 08:36:20 MDT
>There is a huge missed opportunity here: right after 911 the US
>government could have acted as a paragon of democracy, the open
>societiy and human rights. It would have earned it further respect
100% in agreement !!
During the week after September 11, I was finishing my bike trip in
Tenerife and spending it with a group of volcanologists on the top of El
Teide volcano in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. (Strange way to spend
my holiday, I know.) There was one other American besides me in that
group of 30 scientists, the rest of the people were from Britain,
Iceland, Spain, Italy, Germany and France. Televisions were turned on in
people's rooms constantly, watching the news to see what and how the
U.S. would react to the attacks. They were expecting something like
WWIII to break out, and instead the U.S. government deliberated long and
hard about how best to respond. That impressed the nonAmericans in this
group of people. They had expected a wild and careless response. During
those immediate weeks afterwards, the time was ripe and raw for fresh
new changes in government policies, everywhere, not only in the U.S.
Changes that showed respect, understanding, justice, fairness.
It makes me sad and also angry that such a great opportunity was missed.
The U.S. government has a most amazing document called the Constitution
and an amazing ability to be open to changes, but instead it followed a
very old and well-worn path that thousands of years of human history has
shown will fail. Following fears. Instead of the world being more open,
and differences between cultures and religions being accepted and
understood better, now the world is more closed, much much less free and
several orders of magnitude more paranoid than it was before.
Amara
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." -Thomas Edison
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:03 MST