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| Randy Best Leader-in-Training President, North Carolina Society for Ethical Culture WE MUST SEEK JUSTICE AND WE MUST SEEK PEACE Words are inadequate to describe the turmoil of our emotions after the recent acts of terrorism in New York and Washington, D.C. Yet we must try and articulate our feelings. The act of writing our reactions down helps us to release feelings that should not remain bottled up inside. More importantly, it lets us look at our reactions and reflect on them in the light of our values. When we witness terrible acts that defy our comprehension our minds are numb. We cannot imagine how such hate can exist. Hatred which propels others to commit violence with such total disregard for the value of life causes us to mourn for all humanity. How can we respond to such terrible acts of carnage and death? Our first response is to help the innocent victims of the attack. The determination and courage demonstrated by those responding to these emergencies, the selfless acts, the dogged persistence in the face of danger. This heroism has demonstrated our human capacity to care for each other. And this caring response must persist because many have been damaged in ways that may never heal. Our collective responses to help the victims have shown us at our best. This has helped us restore faith in human compassion. Our second response is to condemn these acts, for there can be no excuse sufficient to justify the taking of so many lives. Accompanying our condemnation is a call for justice. We must seek justice, not revenge, retaliation or retribution. We must pursue justice through the international courts as was done after the Pan Am Lockerbee bombing. I believe that justice through the international courts is the only approach that will take us towards a global solution to the problem of terrorism. This slow but deliberate path does not give us the gratification of a quick response. It places a check on our natural desire for vengeance. It will let the world community act together to punish the perpetrators of these terrible crimes. Our third response should be to look at the actions of our country to see if we can gain any insight as to what motivated this hatred toward us. As it turns out, we are not as innocent as we may have believed. We can see that in fact our government helped create terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden when it was in our "interests" to harass the Russian troops in Afghanistan. We did not care about the human suffering that we were creating and we helped set the stage for the rise of the extremist Taliban to power. Our government has been willing to subordinate human rights to other political goals in Afghanistan and elsewhere and we have let them do it. The terrorist attacks were not against our country as the beacon of freedom and democracy in the world, as some would have us believe, but were against an America that has supported terror and oppression in many foreign lands. The world did indeed change on September eleventh. We too must change. We must seek justice together with the world community. We must seek to respond to hatred with compassion. We must hear the cries of the oppressed and respond by recognizing their human rights. We must spend our resources on promoting peace and prosperity not warfare and oppression. We must change so that we are guided by compassion, not politics and economic advantage. I cannot promise that we will ever satisfactorily resolve the turmoil in our hearts created by the terrible events on September eleventh. I do know that if we respond in haste, act for retaliation and swift retribution, we will only fuel this cycle of hatred and violence. I also know that we must change to promote a more humane world of peace and justice or the terror that we have created will never stop.
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