Despair Is Not An Option: William Sloane Coffin

(appearing in the Jan. 12 issue of _The Nation_)

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1226-08.htm

Despair Is Not an Option
by William Sloane Coffin

 Many people believed at the time that the trauma of 9/11 would change the world. My feeling was that our American response would be far more crucial. The President, after all, did not have to declare war. He could have called the terrorists mass murderers, their deeds crimes against humanity. He could have said to the American people and the world, "We will respond, but not in kind. We will not seek to avenge the death of innocent Americans by the death of innocent victims elsewhere, lest we become what we abhor. We refuse to ratchet up the cycle of violence that brings only ever more death, destruction and deprivation. What we will do is build coalitions with other nations. We will share intelligence, freeze assets and engage in forceful extraditions of terrorists if internationally sanctioned. I promise to do all in my power to see justice done, but by the force of law only, never by the law of force."

It was a ripe moment--to educate the soul of the nation, to improve the quality of our suffering. We had lost our sense of invulnerability and superpower invincibility, but as these were only illusions, we should not have grieved their passing. Other nations too had been unfairly hurt, many of them, and far worse than we. But instead of deepening our kinship with the world's suffering, the President chose to invoke an almost unlimited sense of entitlement to pursue in our own way what he termed a struggle "to rid the world of evil."

As a result we squandered the widely felt sympathy that was ours on 9/11, symbolized by the headline in Le Monde the following day: Nous sommes tous Américains. We also squandered the near-record budget surplus that could have helped victims abroad as well as the homeless and hungry in the United States, where poverty is a tragedy that great wealth makes a sin. Finally, ironically and predictably, the Bush doctrine of unilateralism and preventive war has recruited more terrorists than it has cowed. Clearly the past two years have been morally and politically disastrous.

But tempus fugit--an election year is upon us, another ripe moment for educating and for changing regimes in Washington. While turned off by the President's chirping optimism, I still find encouraging such developments as the following:
..more..

But how could chimpy make his friends richer with a plan like that?

is despair."

Always liked that.

Thanks fer the article!

:hi:

when it's stated so well.

The inhabitants of the tower had no time for the niceties of voluntary participation in dmeocracy. They ran. Froze in mistaken strategies. Most did not give up while their feet could still move. Many moved directly against danger. Those on top of the building- trapped- those were the people with real cause and many jumped from the flames- the onlty two options left.

Depsair is an insult and a danger in itself. we are all moving in hope. Some to safety. Some to confrontation. Some, willingly or not, to the last hopeless refuge.

Are we waiting for the moment of doom or acting while we have better choices than those poor people in New York?

I for one value life and the future, not the defining heroism of criis drama for sdome future memorial or movie. To be some catharsis for the masses who avoid doing anything to stop the next calamity. Ask the widows of 911 of the gift of myth bestowed on the slaughtered. It is an evasion of responsibility, a maudlin sentiment that dishonors our common humanity. Our common suckerdom is celebrated absurdly. Responbility successfully evaded. Fear taken in as a permanent guest rather than heed knowledge and the call to change.