All I can say is: I do not want the terrorists who committed this atrocity to sleep well and live long. They should be toppled, smashed and pulverized. I don't want the U.S. stomping around doing the 800-lb. gorilla act throwing bombs willy-nilly at possible terrorist hide-outs if there is a likelihood that civilians will go down. If it were possible to show the Who's Who in Terrorism what's what, single out the perpetrators without harming anyone else, I'd say, Go Kill the Bastards, and Now.

What else? I want Arab-Americans, Arab-Canadians and Arab-Arabs to live free from harassment and harm. I want the economy to be ruddy and robust. I do not relish the prospect of WWIII. I want peace. I am scared. I have bitten off several of my fingernails. I stay up until four every night reading op-ed piece after encyclopedia entry after weblog trying to make sense of what's going on. I thank my own personal agnostified deity-stand-in and my lucky stars to be safe and healthy and living in a country where I can not only learn to read and write, vote, speak my mind, choose my mate, worship whatever facet of the great omnipotent Is I choose, but go see Hong Kong action flicks, get take-out shwarma, vacation in Fiji, and a thousand other things I no longer take for granted. I hope there will be a national re-shuffling of priorities away from Gary Condit, Monica Lewinsky, O.J., Lady Di and other minor news stories to the tragedies happening all over the world, every day, not just now. I am learning a lot about things I never thought much about. I see the reasons why my parents -- who were children during WWII, my mother living in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation -- are the way they are. I need a lot of hugging.

So, Guy Who Wrote Me, the answer is, I don't know what the U.S. military should do. I only have hopes and fears and a heart beating like a tom-tom, just like the rest of us.

I'd never been to a Muslim country before. I read 1001 Arabian Nights on the plane flying over. I was amazed at how many of the stories I already knew: Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin and the Lamp... And when I arrived -- everywhere there were beautiful, intricate patterns, in the carpets, in the tilework, in the facades of the buildings, arabesque upon arabesque, great cat's cradles of intersecting lines that led you to infinity.

The mix of the different cultures were remarkable. The woman who worked at the cleaners on the corner from where we were staying in Beirut wore a red white and blue veil completely covering her hair and full gangsta regalia underneath: a big baggy nylon sweatsuit with TOMMY HILFIGER emblazoned across the back, big Nikes with the tongues pulled forward. Some Saudi women spotted at Beit Edine who were not allowed to speak in public -- some of them were not even allowed to speak with their children -- were swathed from head to toe in opaque black fabric. Sometimes you could catch a glimpse of Prada shoes sticking out from underneath, but most of the time you couldn't tell if they were coming or going until they started walking. On the street in Hama, one of the most conservative cities in Syria where we counted 67 minarets from the hotel's roof patio, I found a scrap of paper on the sidewalk: it was an essay in English on Waiting for Godot. I sat in an outdoor cafe in Istanbul and someone busted out an oud and started singing a song everyone apparently knew, the Turkish equivalent of She'll be Coming Round the Mountain, because everyone in the restaurant and people walking by -- little kids and grandpas and teenagers and moms -- all started singing along.

The people that I met were phenomenally kind, kinder than any other people I've ever met, and that includes people fabled for their kindness such as Filipinos. They have an ancient tradition of hospitality there, having been nomadic people since time immemorial. Walid, the man who drove us in his 1959 Studebaker to see the ruins around Aleppo left us several times a day to say his prayers, but he always timed our tour perfectly so we had cool drinks and shade and something interesting to see before he departed. When he returned, he always brought us cookies.When we bought coffee from a cart in the street, the people in the tire store across the street brought out their chairs for us to sit on; when we asked directions, the person we asked would walk us all the way there, even if it took a half of an hour. An elderly man came up to me in one of the souks holding open his Arabic-English Book and pointing to the translation of 'hello' saying "Hello! Hello! How are you! Hello!" and smiling like he was about to burst into blossom and everywhere you went there were children yelling "Welcome! Welcome!" That the thing I most remember: "Welcome! Welcome!" I never didn't hear it.

All these people screaming for blood are making me sick. I've been trembling all day in impotent rage and utter horror at the idea of all the impending destruction, and the death of innocent people. No.

When you think Taliban, think "Nazis." When you think Bin Laden, think "Hitler." And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps."

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan--a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans,they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban--by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that's Bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

The Good. I'm not one of those people that believes that good comes of everything, that even bad experiences can "make you better", that suffering necessarily begets wisdom. I think that there are things that are just bad, only evil, solely wrong -- steely and grim, unenhanced by any silver lining. Terror and darkness are terror and darkness, and while the best of times and the worst of times often happen simultaneously, it is not the bad that begets the good. The good was always there, it just shines brighter in the darkness.

During the past three days I've seen the generosity of millions of people all over the world. I received dozens of messages from friends and family and complete strangers, saying they loved me, saying they were there if they were needed, saying all kinds of earnest, heartfelt things. IM'ing with my sister Corey, she told me about her volunteer work at a local school in San Francisco where she's working with a troubled kid whose mother is a prostitute and who watched his father get killed. She's teaching him to write his name. IM'ing with my friend Emily in New York, she kept running to the oven to take out more cookies since she could only make 8 cookies at a time in her little oven. She was baking them for the rescue workers down by the WTC, and was going to bring them down herself. These stories made my heart swell. And right here where I live, some small piece of good: I have been angry with my mother. I buried the hatchet and called her. I told her I loved her.

Yesterday I went outside and watched a particularly beautiful sunset over English Bay. It was so beautiful -- green and pink and purple -- and it made me terribly sad, because there was so much misery all over the world, so much loss, death, hatred, anger, and a brewing war. I came back in and IM'd my friend Elizabeth and told her how bleak the beauty made me feel, the encroaching twilight, the death of day, and she said, "Don't feel bad. Every little bit of happiness is what the world needs right now."

The main complaint that I've been hearing from my friends and family and have been reading on weblogs is that they feel helpless, that there is nothing that they can do in the wake of this atrocity. They've given to the Red Cross, they've given blood, they've baked cookies. They've told everyone they can they love them. There's nothing more to do but to watch the news with dread.

The world needs these last days' kindness and generosity every day. When I was helping at a soup kitchen at the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco one Christmas Day, I remember a harried worker saying to the many volunteers, "These people are hungry every day. This kitchen is open every day. Please, please come and help us on days that are not Christmas."

. . . . .

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

. . . . .

From Eunice Scarfe:

Americans Show Unity Against Terrorism - Friday, Sept. 14, 2001

Friday Night at 7:00 p.m. step out your door, stop your car, or step out of your establishment and light a candle. We will show the world that Americans are strong and united together against terrorism. Please pass this to everyone on your e-mail list, or post it to your web site. We need to reach everyone across the United States quickly. The message: WE STAND UNITED - WE WILL NOT TOLERATE TERRORISM!

Thank you.

"I woke up yesterday with a line from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" reverberating through my head endlessly ("I had not thought death had undone so many"). The last time I read it must have been eight or nine years ago, so I felt compelled to dig it up and read it as soon as I got out of bed. After re-reading it, I feel even more stunned than before -- in places, it reads almost as prophecy. The image of streams of people walking over the London Bridge after a friend in NYC described to me the crowds walking home from midtown to queens over the bridge. . . . the dust. .. .the stony rubbish. . . the falling towers. Amazing, powerful, and moving."

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust

. . . . .

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

. . . . .

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

I'd been waiting to find the words to describe this experience we've all been going through, wondering where the poets were in all of this and when they would speak up. I really believe that writers and poets are able to articulate the things we are helpless to speak, that they have access to the numinous and the divine -- truth, beauty, all those seemingly antiquated pre-ironic concepts -- and our very hearts.

Rebecca Blood, always a clear thinker, has some very cogent -- and I think correct -- ideas about the missing motivations of the terrorists, and what they potentially misunderstood:

I am No Historian, but as I understand it, our government was designed to be a coalition of states. Federal government was designed to do those things that could be done more efficiently by a larger entity for all; but it was intended to support the self-governace of individual states.

Clearly circumstances of all kinds have changed, and each state is more reliant on federal government than our Founders ever envisioned they would be. But it's clear to me that in an instance of the removal of our federal government, states would discover that they are, in fact, endowed with power sufficient to govern until federal government was up and running.

In other words, if the yesterday's purpose was to cripple the United States, the terrorists have an incomplete understanding of both the US Constitution and the US character. To wit:

- through an accident of history, states have Constitionally derived powers sufficient to govern their people, with or without a fully functional federal government.
- most Americans do not recognize the true source of our global strength. Many Americans truly believe that we prevail because of the ideals our nation has espoused, not due to our inordinate military and economic power.

The following published approximately 30 years ago is from a Canadian newspaper. Its subject is America: The Good Neighbor.

Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as printed in the Congressional Record:

"This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States. When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.

When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped. The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.

I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American Planes?

Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy, and you find men on the moon-not once, but several times-and safely home again. You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here.

When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name you 5000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those."

Henry Kissinger : "Of course there should be some act of retaliation, and I would certainly support it, but it cannot be the end of the process and should not even be the principal part of it. The principal part has to be to get the terrorist system on the run, and by the terrorist system I mean those parts of it that are organized on a global basis and can operate by synchronized means."

George F. Will, The Paradox of Terrorism:

"... many years ago a Chinese theorist said: "Kill one, frighten 10,000." A modern student of terrorism has correctly said that in the age of terrorism, the axiom should be: "Kill one, frighten 10 million."

"The real aim of terrorism is not to destroy people or physical assets, still less to score anything remotely resembling military victories. Rather, its purpose is to demoralize.

"Terrorism acquires its power from the special horror of its randomness, and from the magnification of it by modern media, which make the perpetrators seem the one thing they are not – powerful. Terrorism is the tactic of the weak."

I was stunned. I am still stunned. I am mute. My heart is in my mouth, so many dead, so many dead.

Them's purty fancy duds yu're sportin, podnuh, he says, all them thar fringes'n tassels'n porkypine quills, yu look tartier than one a them dandified joolbox coffins from out the east, which I sorely wisht I had now fer my imminent laying out in.

Sumbitchin outlaw rustlers tuck everthin I got. I wuz holed up thar in my cabin in all-day firefight standin off hunderds of em. It were mighty festive fer a time. I musta plugged fifty a them lowdown sneakthief claim-jumping desperadoes afore I burnt up all my munitions, hadta rassle barehand with the last of em, thet's when them savages et my arm'n stuck all these here knives in me. But ifn I'da had another gun at my side we mighta whupped them consarned butt-fuckin no-good rannahans. So whut tuck yu so long gittin here, podnuh?

Today's activities:

• Called the Worm Composting hotline and set a time to go to the apartment composting workshop. For $25 they give residents of Vancouver lessons, a composting bucket and a supply of red worms so you can compost your kitchen waste in an urban setting. Good for your windowsill herb garden.
• Watched the BC Tel guy try to fix the faulty DSL wiring.
• Went to bank, deposited check using ATM. Just as I was making a hefty withdrawal, just as a tremendous amount of cash was about to come squeezing through its slot, a homeless guy started searching the garbage can next to me. I positioned my body between the guy and the fat wad spurting from the machinery, and quickly stuffed the twenties into my wallet. Then I felt sorry and bad for a little while for being so suspicious and greedy when I was holding so much money in my hands and he was so broke.
• Went to the Salvation Army and bought a bunch of non-matching china, a couple of japanese vases and stood and considered buying a wildly underpriced Danish modern bookcase. Wondered why there was always so much great mid-century modern furniture in the thrift stores, and where were all the dealers. Quick, freelance penny-pinching modernistas! Grab all the good stuff before the vultures move in!
• Picked up the following books from the library, which I had ordered for them to ship to my local branch and hold for me using their online system (I love the internet!):
  • The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams
  • The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
  • The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen
• Sensing impending sunset by the pinkness of the walls on the building next door, I ducked out of the apartment, ran down the stairs and across the street. Perfect timing. A minute later, the sun, trembling redly on the verge of the sea, set anticlimactically. Watched it get dunked and fizzle out weakly, then ran back upstairs. Took about four minutes.
• Ordered Indian food delivered, Saag Paneer and Aloo Gobi, Garlic Naan and Somosas. Yum.
• Sat down to finally start writing, procrastinated by writing this blog entry.