To say that we are one in spirit, interconnected in being means right now that we are one with the victims of the Tuesday attack, one with the grieving families. Moreover, if there is a lesson for us as Americans to be learned from this attack it is that we must be one with those who are the victims of US bombing and US sponsored attacks on human life throughout the world.
We are now given a special opportunity to transform the raw grief we feel, our own vulnerability being under attack within our own country, our own fears, our sense of terror that there may be other strikes - we don't know where, we don't know when. For we are experiencing the very grief, the same fear, the unknown terror that is the daily life experience of everyday people in Palestine, in Iraq, whose terror is supported by the US, in Northern Ireland and in Israel, and other places where bombing and shooting are everyday events. We now have the opportunity to exit from American isolation and from our own pain and in our own grief to identify with those victims, those families who suffer from loss, repeatedly at US hands, from other male dominated aggressors.
When we look at the lines of people with photographs of loved ones held to their hearts, looking and waiting for word, hoping for life, we can immediately be reminded of the mothers of the "disappeared" who carried those pictures for years, in Argentina and in Chile after the bloody US sponsored coup that set up the vicious dictator, Pinochet, or in Guatemala, in East Timor and many other countries.
And when we take this next step in our grief, from our own fears and pain, we will become intolerant of any act of terror, state sponsored or paramilitaries, or individual. When we are intolerant of terror we will have to call upon our government as we did during the war in Vietnam to cease and desist - not only its plans for revenge attacks, but its own state sponsored terror. Only then will we begin to heal, for we can only heal together as one.
This is the lesson I have learned from this weeks attack. I send it on to you in the hope that it makes sense, as I look for any evidence of like-minded consciousness from which we can begin, once again, to make change. Please share this as you see fit.
Love and peace,
Kathleen Barry
Santa Rosa, California
September 14, 2001