The white flag of surrender.
Posted on 09/28/2001 12:25:20 PM PDT by RaceBannon
Targeted for hate mail
By JENNIE TRASCHEN
Friday, September 28, 2001 --
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we've all spent a good deal of time reflecting on the heroism that so many people have shown. We have heard about the firefighters and other rescue workers who put their lives at risk, many of whom gave their lives to save other people. We have heard about the phone conversation recording how the passengers in one of the planes, acted heroically so that their plane would not be used to kill further innocent people.
The horrifying core of Sept. 11's events was the murder of so many innocent people and the grief of all those who remain. We think about those who died on the planes. We think about those who were buried alive. We cannot change what has happened, but we can try to follow the examples of heroism which are have been placed before us.
The work that needs to be done is to prevent as much further death and suffering as we possibly can. Part of this work, I think, is very simple. It involves figuring out what we should not do. If we love a mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son or friend, then we don't have to explain the fact that their well being is more important to us than anything else. It just is so. Therefore, we understand how terrible it is for innocent, ordinary people to be killed by bombs or bullets, no matter where they live. For they too are children, with siblings and parents. Revenge against innocent people should not be any part of addressing our own loss.
Figuring out what we should do is a more challenging task. I do not think that capturing Osama bin Laden and his associates will be sufficient to make the world safe from terrorism. Our work must include asking some difficult questions and doing some important learning. What are the real roots of the terrorism? I think we have to do some learning about what goes on in places like Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. What are the living conditions and the political conditions like for most people in these countries? How have the sanctions against Iraq affected the Iraqi people? What disease and death among children has resulted from the sanctions, and can we understand the grief of their parents? What's it like living in a Palestinian refugee camp? What role has the U.S. played in these countries and how do the people who live there think about the U.S.?
We have to do our homework. We must work to establish a humane peace, globally. For the causes of violence, hate and terror, are global. We need to understand that trying to explain why we have become the targets of terrorism is not in any way the same as condoning it. We do need, will need, the strength and vision of heroes to carry out this work.
I requested space for this commentary because the Bulletin printed a very misleading "quote" from me two weeks ago that was extracted from a statement I made at a meeting of the Amherst Select Board Sept. 10, the night before the attack. My comments were part of a public discussion about the display of 29 additional flags in downtown Amherst. This "quote" was further distributed around the Internet, showing up recently on the Wall Street Journal online Opinion page.
As a result, I have received a large quantity of hateful e-mail and phone calls. Most of these have been ugly and violent in tone. Many recent ones, from readers of the WSJ site, have also been obscene. Almost all have been anonymous. These anonymous, hostile, obscene messages accuse me of undermining American freedoms. They accuse me of supporting violence and terrorism.
This could not be further from the truth. Since I was a child, I have been involved in working for peace. I abhor violence, torture, and murder. At the Select Board hearing, at which there were quite a few veterans present, I spoke about how I learned my values from my parents. My father was a World War II veteran. My mother spent agonizing months at home after his plane was shot down. My father survived, thanks to the courage of the French Resistance.
While I was growing up, I went to many demonstrations with my parents and stood with them on many picket lines. They were peace activists during the Vietnam war. My parents did not believe that what our government was doing in Vietnam was in any way consistent with what my father had fought for in World War II. Throughout their lives, my parents continued to work for peace and for the democratic rights of all peoples.
During my own years as an activist, many civilians in different parts of the world lost their lives as a direct result of our government's policies. Throughout the cold war years, our government backed dictatorships in numerous parts of the world that brutally suppressed human rights in the name of anti-communism. This is what I spoke about to the Select Board on Sept. 10. The contents of the harassing messages would seem ludicrous to me, if they were not so scary.
At the advice of two Select Board members, I talked to the chief of police on Sept. 13 about the harassment I was receiving. They were very kind, very professional, and I feel confident of the safety of my family and neighbors. The police advised me not to respond to the messages, although I felt a strong desire to defend myself and set the record straight.
Not all of the callers were hateful. One local caller left his name and number and asked for a call back. I felt that I had to return this call. We talked, not a comfortable conversation, but I believe a good one. Partly we compared experiences of different of our family members who had served in the U.S. armed forces and what the flag meant to them.
Similarly, there were many veterans who are Amherst residents who were at the Select Board Meeting who spoke very sensibly and movingly about what the flag means to them. If the discussion had included only local voices, it probably would have been a typical public meeting in the town of Amherst: a wide range of opinions, feelings, and analysis are presented in an atmosphere in which everyone's right to present their view is respected. In Amherst, we have learned to be tolerant of each other's attempts to speak, to work to understand other people's points of view, and then figure out how to compromise and run a great town.
Let's keep it up. In fact, maybe we should spread this strategy around a little more.
Jennie Traschen is an associate professor of physics at UMass.
In other words, Jennie, If only LIBERAL, Hate-America-First people spoke, you would have felt right at home, eh?
Jennie, I clearly heard you state how the flying of the flag was wrong because people across the world think it represents terrorism. Not Freedom. Not a selter to come to and hide from oppression. Not the great country that is has become. Where else would you hide, Jennie, that you could speak against while you were there?
Thanks to people like Jennie, we have a limp wristed history of trying to sing Kum-Bay-Yah with our enemies, instead of destroying those who try to destroy us. Thanks Jennie, at least in America we admit our mistakes. The Soviet Union had to fall apart before they admitted anything...
The white flag of surrender.
Keep your barf bags handy!
I'm stunned she would listen to the evil POLICE, don't they carry guns, engage in racial profiling and shoot innocent civilians on an hourly basis?
This Anti-American certainly has bad-timing but there are many others who HATE America in our ranks. 90% of them are Dems or Greens who hate personal responsibility.
They are evil-doers because they poison our society with Socialist clap-trap. Note: Socialism fails every time. Things just have to get bad enough for people to rebel or the civilized world to respond.
BOOOOoooooooo to this woman. She should be shunned by decent people, not coddled or felt sorry for.
Mark your calander for 10/24 my friend!
In 1942, George Orwell wrote, in Partisan Review, this of Great Britain's pacifists: "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.
This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.'
Replace pro-facist with pro-Arab Mass Murderers and you have Orwell updated to describe Clymers like Ramsey Clark and this hate American, Jennie and their hatred of America/Americans and their love of America's Enemy's, like the Arab Mass Murderers of 9/11!
Ramsey Clark and the hate Americans like Jennie are the real terrorists in America with what he/she has done since Viet Nam!
What this b$tch needs to realize is when she speaks against our flag after 9/11, she is a person that uses hate and dares to call it peace!
Even if we the policies that inflamed these bastards were opposed by 90% of Americans, we still couldn’t react to this action by changing them. Every group that disagreed with us would know that the group that does the most damage is going to get our vote. It breeds more incidents of terrorism just as giving in to a bully results in more bullying.
"During my own years as an activist, many civilians in different parts of the world lost their lives as a direct result of our government's policies. Throughout the cold war years, our government backed dictatorships in numerous parts of the world that brutally suppressed human rights in the name of anti-communism."
But she did not add:
"Many civilians in different parts of the world lost their lives as a direct result of our government's policies" to fight communist regimes which slaughtered 10's of millions of people and showed little sign of slowing up: the last really big slaughter by communists (supported by Jane Fonda and numerous world-wide socialist organizations among which are now members of the U.S. Congress), being in Cambodia, where over a million people died at the hands of the people whom the Prof. supported by giving to, "aid and comfort."
And many civilians who fought the communists, also died, alone and without much record, such as in Hungary.
True: "our government backed dictatorships;" but not in "numerous" parts of the world. However, backing dictatorships is indeed a sore point with me, as well as the Prof. But then again, "higher-ups" in our government, think-tankers who were politically from both general camps, thought it better to support the least–likely tyrant, and some dictators "won" over some REALLY brutal communists.
I hope that soon, the Prof. will take the money she has taken from us (it's tax dollars), and devote her energy to looking up all the truth which the "liberal media" saw fit to not print, and she, not to relate.
Without which "confessional," she is still part of the most gigantic killing machine the world has ever seen mankind make: Socialism and its one-design, earth-tone variation, Communism.
We might wonder what did the million plus dead Cambodian people do to the Khmer Rouge, that the Communists hated them so much to be motivated like the Taliban's terrorists?
It is like trying to negotiate with someone that wants to chop off your arm - the peaceniks have to realize the moral authority of not breaking with our most sacred principles. Truly bizarre, hate America first logic.
Obviously, our little friend Jennie is a masochist.
What she's really saying is:
"Thank you sir! May I have please have another!
I think she really wants some more letters!
I like that...
This explains it, folks. Her core belief system has been influenced and molded by the "courage" of the French. I ask you: is there really anything else that needs explaining?
MM
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