Just started reading Barack Obama's older book, 'Dreams from My Father'. I have high hopes for it. In just the opening it was the first time that I read a public figure address the terrorism problem confronting it much like I see it.
Here is a small excerpt:'...on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.It is beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would follow-- the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; ... My powers of empathy, my ability to reach intoanother's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
'...the underlying struggle-- between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would see, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us-- is the struggle set forth, on a minature scale, in this book.
I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder-- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware-- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of the lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.'
Here is a small excerpt:'...on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.It is beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would follow-- the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; ... My powers of empathy, my ability to reach intoanother's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
'...the underlying struggle-- between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would see, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us-- is the struggle set forth, on a minature scale, in this book.
I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder-- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware-- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of the lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.'
