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Time to Talk with Each Other and Time to Listen
By Dr. Carol Fleming

Of course we are angry! The enormity, the savagery of the attack on America was intended to blind us with fury. Blind people don't know what's ahead of them. Blind people can make very bad decisions. It is better not to be blind.

Now is the time for the higher brain to kick in, the time for intelligence, cunning and strategy. You can't do this when you're in a rage and operating with your limbic system. We must try to get smart really fast in order to prevail in this period. Human beings get smart by using their language skills to rise above the insistent demands of emotions.

We need to listen and not just to people who think like we do. We need to get other points of view as something to add to the depth of our understanding. I don't mean just pretend to listen while you think up your rebuttal, but search for the speaker's meaning, seek to understand before you respond. You just might learn something that makes all the difference to you.

Listening to someone is one of the greatest gifts you can give them. So even if there is no information as such for you, there is the human capitol that is created with empathetic listening. We need lots more of that today. We need to speak. We need to be with other people and we need to talk together.

We need to put our ideas out on to the public commons and see what happens. If you are like me, you may actually find out what you think only when you try to language it out with another human being. Two interesting things can happen:

Sometimes that person responds in such I way that I realize I don't know what I'm talking about. This makes me determined to become knowledgeable before I shoot off my mouth again.
When I think I'm languaging out ideas, it turns out that I'm also touching on emotions that I did not know I had. My friend James was speaking about the heroes of the attack in New York, when he 'lost it' in front of his Business class. It was more of a surprise to him than to the class. He found this emotional response to be an especially cleansing, welling up from unknown places in his heart.

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We need to read. The deeper thoughts, the greater learning, the careful marshaling of facts and argument happen in written documents. You can learn from people with much greater experience and knowledge than your own circle of friends. Now might be a good time to take advantage of the political columns that appear in the newspaper. I personally recommend those of Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times, a man of special expertise in the Middle East. Here's learning that is readily available.

While in the vein of personal recommendations, I will pass on an especially informative email that I received from several friends. Tamin Ansary is an Afghan-American who writes eloquently, and has important things to tell us. Here is a sample that can help us get perspective on events happening right now.

"I've been hearing a lot of talk about 'bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.' Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio ... allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but he (Owens) said, 'We're at war; we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?' Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we 'have the belly to do what must be done'.”

"And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived here for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.”

"I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York and Washington DC. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

"But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think 'the people of Afghanistan,' think 'the Jews in the concentration camps'.”

"It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the 'rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country.”

"Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, and suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan - a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves."

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"The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban."

"We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done.”

"Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late, someone already did all that.”

"New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don't move too fast; they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban - by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.”

"So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops."

"When people speak of 'having the belly to do what needs to be done' they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand.”

"What's on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan.”

“Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.”

"And guess what: that's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West.”

"It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose, so it's even better from bin Laden's point of view."

"He's probably wrong - in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean. But the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?"

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