Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 20:38:53 -0400
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject: Re: OT personal favor [my last public statement]
In-Reply-To: <4617F5DBE30C8B4DBBF3B0BC46A36EFD028457BD@commsrvr.projectd
esign.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
At 17:52 7/9/2004, someone wrote:
>These things are going to happen. If we did them more before 9-11, the New
>York skyline would still have the Twin Towers.
Being able to walk down the street is expensive. If we allow terrorists to
steal our willingness to walk down the street *merely* by killing a few
thousand of us then they've gotten an extremely cheap and extremely
profound victory. They win nothing by killing us, it's only a weapon to
them. They win by enslaving us to fear. Once they've done that the
fight's over. Or as Kipling put it, once you have paid him the Danegeld,
you will never get rid of the Dane.
Consider...they killed one in 120,000 of us -- if they did it twenty times
a year they'd be as dangerous as cars -- and look at the effect so
far! We've run screaming around in circles hurling away liberties right
and left that our g'g'g'grandparents and many others since died to preserve
-- bah! Ignore them if we can or obliterate them if we must or perhaps
best of all laugh at them (Dean Ing wrote a book about this -- I forget the
name, but googling Right and Proper Charlie ought to get somewhere near
it). But never, ever, fear them in the effective sense of letting their
threats restrict our behavior and our expensive liberties. This is a
moral/spiritual battle, not a physical one, and we're losing it. The
people on the Pennsylvania flight should be our models -- the terrorists
stole their lives and those folks took them back and gave them to us and to
freedom. If the people on the other planes had had the same UNcommon
courage, to take back what they knew was irretrievably lost and put it
where *they* chose on the scales, the cause of terrorism would have
received such a blow as would have it reeling yet. It is our shame that
they did not because we did not bring them up to.
This man is giving us, with his own suffering and his own compassion, a
chance to see, and do better. May we take it, and make his sacrifice
worthwhile.
Thanks very much for listening, and that's all I have to say in public
about it. Private correspondence welcome.
david
All rights reserved, sorry -- publication by anyone in any venue by
explicit permission only.
--
David Beierl - Providence RI USA -- http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage," '85 GL "Poor Relation"
| 
