CHARLES HERE. Well, what a week it's been. I was at my mothers all week and thus had access to a TV and all the powerful images that were presented to the world. Those images kept me in alternating states of horror, anger AND hope. When something of this scale happens, you wonder how as a single individual you are going to help affect the outcome of such vast world-wide events. And of course, the thought did cometo me, "I draw fairy tales, what good is that?" When I was finally back in my studio I was able to reach several friends via e-mail and came upon this from both Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner:

Terri: going on from here...
The following message was posted by my friend Ellen Kushner on the web page for her radio show Sound & Spirit (www.wgbh.org/pri/spirit), and I thought some of you here might like to see it too:

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2001

The day before yesterday, I watched a beloved piece of my world blow up, taking with it thousands of lives. All I could think was, Nothing else matters now. The things I have cared so passionately about were suddenly meaningless.
Poetry? Art? Music?
The first shock made everything but the trauma - even beauty - seem irrelevant. A friend's long-awaited photography exhibit was pointless; my newly-finished novel was a relic of the values of an exploded past.
I woke up the next day drowning in fear and grief. I didn't want to be part of the world that I believed I could see coming.
It took a note from friends in Europe, anxious about our safety, to rouse me from my despair. "The world will never be the same again," they wrote;"May we unite to make it a better one, in however humble a role."
My friends' letter reminded me that we are in the season of the Jewish High Holiday of Rosh Hashanah, a sacred time of year I always love to celebrate - and that one of the great observances of the "Birthday of the World" is to rededicate oneself to the "Healing of the World," tikkun olam.
There is work to be done. And each of us must find what our own work is, and do it. But to be sustained in our work, we must pursue the things that give us strength. We owe it to the world we wish to heal to look for that strength where we can. We may find it in community, in solitude, in family;and, like generations before us, we may find it in language, in music and in art.
The things we celebrate each week on Sound & Spirit did not come into human existence for no reason. Across time, around the globe, they bring us strength.
A Danish friend wrote on Tuesday: "...there is an emotional atmosphere all over Denmark. All night long there were thousands of Danes singing in front of the US embassy. And this morning an ocean of flowers and candlelight covers the street..."
We can sing songs, like the Danes, or like the congregations gathered in churches to commune with familiar hymns, or the kids in D.C. singing the "Star Spangled Banner" in front of the White House, or a mother lulling a frightened child to sleep.
We can consider history: the crazy courage of Londoners during the Blitz, when bombs were dropping from their home skies and St. Paul's was ablaze; we can read their novels and memoirs that suddenly seem to reflect our own lives...
We can tell our own stories: Where were you when it happened? When you heard? You may need to tell that story more than once. You may need to write it down. You may need to remember what you lost. You may need to listen.
The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich said, "But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."
All of us here at Sound & Spirit pray that she was right. Our hearts and thoughts are with you, and we hope that you are finding good places to put the anger and distress, shock and fear that attend this terrible time.
After the final no there comes a yes, wrote American poet Wallace Stevens;
And on that yes the future world depends.
The things that have always helped us are still there in these times, to give us strength in our quest for healing and for repair. It is important not to forget.

Ellen Kushner
Sound & Spirit
Boston, Massachusetts

Stories, myths, folktales, and fairy tales are all elements of the creative life force, sustaining human beings in hard times through countless generations and centuries. I look forward to more discussions on this board about all these things.
-- Terri

This was followed by a message passed on by Neil Gaiman which was in turn passed on by a friend of his. It gave me quite a bit to think about:

Dear Friends,
The following was sent to me by my friend Tamim Ansary. Tamim is an Afghani-American writer. He is also one of the most brilliant people I know in this life. When he writes, I read. When he talks, I listen. Here is his take on Afghanistan and the whole mess we are in. -Gary T.

Dear Gary and whoever else is on this email thread:

I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "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.
I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and Ben 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, 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.
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 actually 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, that'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?

Tamim Ansary

This morning I woke up with the thought that perhaps the site of the World Trade Towers should be turned into a park and dedicated as a peace memorial, as a place of meditation and not used as ground zero for a overwhelming tide of hate that if it is misdirected could plunge this world into more darkness than we have ever seen. We have much to think about in this "new" world that we live in.

PEACE AND HEALING, CHARLES