nmah877.xml

nmah877.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-04

I watched on television with my father. I was preparing to go to the funeral of a lovely family friend who had been killed the previous Friday in a tragic horse riding accident. It was altogether a dreadful day. My father, was 75, sat there and cried and said, "The world has gone mad." At that time, we didn't yet know that we were to lose several family friends.

It's so easy now to be overcome with emotion when thinking about the senselessness and evil of this act. My country is at war and it is a war not of our choosing. We will never be the same here. I know a lot of people who served overseas and all of them said something to the effect of, "Well, now Americans know how the rest of the world feels. This is the way things are." Well I don't agree with that. The rest of the world shouldn't have allowed terrorism to continue for so long. As usual, it will take the Americans to set this problem right. And we will do it. Right or wrongly, we will accomplish it.

That hatred and revenge are terrible emotions and resulted in thousands of innocent lives to be lost and thousands of innocent children to lose a parent or loved one.

But Americans need to be more aware of the rest of the world. There is widespread hunger and poverty beyond our understanding all around us and we continue on our merry way. This doesn't work as we have now witnessed. This breeds hatred and contempt. We need to find a way to reach out to those that hate us and help them to understand that we are not bad. The problem is, though, that we allow American corporations and the government to do really stupid and harmful things around the world with no repercussions. To many bad things are done in the name of "progress". This is really greed. We cannot continue to exploit people and expect them to like us. As a people, we are very good but our institutions let us down too often. People should pay attention to what we are doing around the world and they should protest when it isn't right (and voting would be a good idea also).

Yes, I am still flying the flag. I have always respected the flag as a symbol of all that is good in my country. I continue to respect it but hope that everyone (government and private companies) behave in a respectful manner that does not insult our flag when we are operating overseas. All cultures are different and we need to understand that, not exploit it.