Time for unity

Letter to the editor

To the editor:
   Most of us were not touched physically by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. We were not there, and no one we know was there. And so, after a suitable period of mourning for nearly 7,000 of our fellow men and women whose lives were snuffed out one beautiful summer morning, we can go back to normal life as we knew it. We can if we are fools, and if we have lost all sense of reality and responsibility.
   The conditions of American life have changed and become more dangerous. We must now put aside petty partisan politics and unite for the common good, without forfeiting our right to criticize and improve our society. We must devote our energies to constructing healthy, stable and safe communities, free of intolerance and destructive conflict. We must be less preoccupied with material pleasures and ask what we can do for our country.
   The United States has suffered an unprovoked military attack resulting in a calamitous loss of life, and we are now at war. This attack is a beginning, and hijacked airplanes are not the only method our enemy will use. The fact that it is war against a new kind of enemy — without uniformed battalions or borders, without official declarations or sanction, without fixed battlefields or readily defined targets — might make it more difficult to fight this war. But it is war nevertheless.
   Opponents of a military response to military attack tell us that because America’s conduct in the world has not been faultless we somehow brought this disaster on ourselves. If only we had not pursued certain policies, the mass murderers would have spared our nation — content, perhaps, to confine their attention to other victims. That is a dangerous delusion; and it is an irresponsible attitude toward the defense of our country and its friends.
   They attacked us and slaughtered our people not because of any oppressive acts we have committed when we were in the wrong. They attacked precisely because, when we are in the right, we oppose their oppressive regimes and represent the best hope of people everywhere for freedom and a good life. If America really stood for tyranny, these masters of terror and intolerance would never hate us with such ferocity.
   This is not a time for the American people to be paralyzed by doubt or guilt because of the flaws in our country’s history or current policies. The past teaches us that even the noblest cause does not require its champions to be angels. This is a time for national — and international — unity against a fanatical and authoritarian enemy, who has contempt for modern secular ideas, for human rights like freedom of religion and speech, and for life.
   We are engaged in a war for the survival of democracy. Our enemy’s strategic goal is the destruction of every vestige of political and religious liberty, every measure of social and economic progress achieved in the world through generations of struggle. The evidence is tragically clear in the lands they have already enslaved.
Bernard Bush
East Windsor