tp67.xml
Title
tp67.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2003-02-28
TomPaine Story: Story
""Toward A More Perfect Union: Lessons Learned - Or Not - Since 9/11""
As a person who saw the Twin Towers destroyed, I say passionately that what people should have learned from 9/11 is how dangerous contempt is, and the urgent need to be against it. Eli Siegel, poet, philosopher, and founder of the education Aesthetic Realism, showed that contempt "the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it" is the cause of all the cruelty and injustice that has ever been. In the international journal, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism Ellen Reiss writes:
Contempt is what impelled the persons who arranged for human beings to be killed and buried under 110 stories of rubble near the Hudson River on a beautiful September morning.
Yet our leaders have responded to this contempt by having enormous contempt themselves: by trying to make the Constitution worthless and democracy redundant, and by continuing to act with brutal indifference to what millions of people around the world feel and deserve.
Ellen Reiss explains:
Every one of us would like to issue an executive order: ëI want the world on my termsóand fast! And I wont stand for any questioning in the matter. In the instance of a national leader, the ability to have things on ones own terms and unquestioned affects millions of people, often in the most crucial, intimate, agonizing, life-or-death ways.
And this contempt pervades the American attitude to the rest of the world, friend and foe alike. In "#1 Rogue Nation," USA Today writes:
Around the world many see the US as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and contemptuous of others.
For the world to be safe and 9/11 made this an emergency people everywhere must study and oppose contempt everywhere, including in themselves and in their leaders.
As a person who saw the Twin Towers destroyed, I say passionately that what people should have learned from 9/11 is how dangerous contempt is, and the urgent need to be against it. Eli Siegel, poet, philosopher, and founder of the education Aesthetic Realism, showed that contempt "the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it" is the cause of all the cruelty and injustice that has ever been. In the international journal, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism Ellen Reiss writes:
Contempt is what impelled the persons who arranged for human beings to be killed and buried under 110 stories of rubble near the Hudson River on a beautiful September morning.
Yet our leaders have responded to this contempt by having enormous contempt themselves: by trying to make the Constitution worthless and democracy redundant, and by continuing to act with brutal indifference to what millions of people around the world feel and deserve.
Ellen Reiss explains:
Every one of us would like to issue an executive order: ëI want the world on my termsóand fast! And I wont stand for any questioning in the matter. In the instance of a national leader, the ability to have things on ones own terms and unquestioned affects millions of people, often in the most crucial, intimate, agonizing, life-or-death ways.
And this contempt pervades the American attitude to the rest of the world, friend and foe alike. In "#1 Rogue Nation," USA Today writes:
Around the world many see the US as arrogant, hypocritical, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and contemptuous of others.
For the world to be safe and 9/11 made this an emergency people everywhere must study and oppose contempt everywhere, including in themselves and in their leaders.
Collection
Citation
“tp67.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed December 22, 2024, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/642.