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September 10 - 14, 2001 - Global Policy Forum - Email 'Listserv' News
GPF List-Serv
September 10 - 14, 2001Greetings from Global Policy Forum!
Thanks to all the GPF supporters who have emailed us or called to express their concern about our well-being after the terrible events at the World Trade Center on Tuesday. We are happy to report that we are safe and that our offices, which are located some four miles from the WTC, are likewise unharmed.
On Tuesday morning as we came to work, we passed fire engines racing at top speed down Second Avenue, their sirens wailing. We soon learned that one of the WTC towers was on fire. By ten o'clock, our building was evacuated. We did not know that by that time both towers had collapsed. All we knew was that there was a terrible emergency and that all transportation in the city had stopped. So we walked many miles home, discovering scraps of the news as we went. It was a very frightening experience, even though we were distant from the main scene of the disaster.
We resumed work in the office on Wednesday and many aspects of life in the city are returning more-or-less to normal. But everyone is deeply shaken, even traumatized by the events and it is difficult to work. The UN has cancelled the Children's Summit next week and many other events are being cancelled. A sense of uncertainty prevails.
Everyone searches for a means to understand what has happened, but meanings are hard to come by. The news media mesmerize and they drone on with endless facts, while providing mostly one-dimensional reports which provide no sense of history or context, reinforcing passivity and anger, based on visceral sympathy for the victims. Public officials intone their judgment that what has happened is an "attack on freedom and on civilization itself."
However abominable the acts of terror, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they have sprung predictably from a world of vast injustice and violence and that they are chickens coming home to roost, targeting potent symbols of the economic and military might of a superpower that has consistently rejected its treaties and its obligations to international law in favor of naked, unchecked domination.
As we write, fighter jets scream over the city, to reassure and guard the populace but also as a grim reminder of a militarized and security-heavy future, in which we could soon find ourselves. But hope must remain that in the often chaotic globalizing world of citizen solidarity and democratic action, another future awaits. It must be wrested from the violence of the terrorist desperadoes, the rapacity of global capital, and the violence of the official war and security apparatus. To bring that alternative future into being will be our greatest challenge.
Here are our links for this much-disrupted and tragic week
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