9.15.01 - Visualize World Peace

I am horribly saddened by everything that has happened in NY and VA. I have not been personally touched, but I still feel the pain. I still cry. I still worry. I am angry at the people who support and incite this type of religious fanaticism. I am angry at the people (Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson) who blame this on gays, feminists, the ACLU, and People for the American Way. I am angry at the divisiveness. I want this all to end now.

However, I am saddened by what will happen in the future. War is not the answer. It never is. Sure, call me a hippie-type radical. Perhaps I am. I want to visualize peace. I want my child -- my beautiful and wonderful child -- to know nothing but happiness and beauty. I want his world to be filled with peace.

But I fear that peace will not come any time soon.

I hope that you have the peace and love in your heart enough to pray, meditiate, visualize or whatever it is you do for the people involved. The people who are in pain. The people who hate. The people who caused this.

The suicide hijackers are as human as you are. They are the same flesh and blood as you, and the same spirit as you. They have chosen to hurt, perhaps because they hurt? I don't know. I just know that All That Is/ God / the universe / peace / Light / Allah (whatever you personally call it) is the ONLY answer to the problem. And the universe is love. God is love. Peace is love.

So, if you want to stop this madness, do what you can to send love to everyone you can think of. Even your enemy.

Help bring light back to this world.

Found in my e-mails:

Dear Friends,

I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's been going on over there. So I want to share a few thoughts with anyone who will listen.

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 fervently wish to see those monsters punished. But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who captured Afghanistan in 1997 and have been holding the country in bondage ever since. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a master 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 love for someone to eliminate the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country. I guarantee it.

Some say, if that's the case, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban themselves? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, damaged, and incapacitated. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan-a country with no economy, no food. Millions of Afghans are widows of the approximately two million men killed during the war with the Soviets.

And the Taliban has been executing these women for being women and has buried some of their opponents alive in mass graves. The soil of Afghanistan is littered with land mines and almost all the farms have been destroyed. The Afghan people have tried to overthrow the Taliban. They haven't been able to.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble with that scheme is, it's already been done. The Soviets took care of it . 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? There is no infrastructure. Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only land in 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. (They have already, I hear.)

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 be making common cause with the Taliban -- by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.

I don't have a solution. But I do believe that suffering and poverty are the soil in which terrorism grows. Bin Laden and his cohorts want to bait us into creating more such soil, so they and their kind can flourish. We can't let him do that. That's my humble opinion.

Tamim Ansary