tp76.xml

tp76.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-02-28

It has been a year since we watched two planes fly into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, stunning our minds and changing our lives. At the time, many of us asked why this had happened. A year later, judging from the news about our ""war on terrorism,"" it seems we still have not answered that question. For that answer we need to look, both within the United States, and at our relations with other countries of the world.

Twenty years ago, for several years, I lived in Amman, Jordan. The people I knew in Jordan, despite their anger at our support of Israel, admired America and the American people. One of our close friends, a Jordanian who worked for Jordan's English language television network, said he did not understand why Americans, who had so much freedom and the power to influence their government's behavior seemed so uninterested in that government's foreign polices.

I told him that Americans led busy lives, and that we depended on our news media to let us know what was going on in the world. If the media did not present both sides of an issue, most Americans did not know their was another side. He shrugged--such a waste of such freedom and power.

We may not know much about the people of the Middle East, but our government's policies affect their day to day lives, and in some cases, their freedom or lack thereof. Our democracy within a Republic depends on well-informed citizens. We owe it to ourselves, to the founders of our Republic, and to the world that is so impacted by our behavior to find the answers we need, to make decisions based on a sense of justice and responsibility.