Editor,
For the first time, I have seen my country truly bleed. The wound is still fresh, the blood still warm. My sense-of-security blanket has been torn from me in my slumber, and reality proves the rudest of alarm clocks to awaken me from my dreams of "It Can't Happen Here."
Like all Americans, I have lost a part of myself and acquired other things in its place: fear, anger, outrage, disbelief and sorrow.
We have begun the collective process of asking, "What do we do next?" The answer is not simple, but it must be rational.
America's response to the Sept. 11 attacks must be formulated through logical consideration rather than desperate retribution. The people who frighten me most right now are not the faceless perpetrators of these crimes; rather, I am frightened by the faces of people I encounter every day, who insist that we must avenge our lost by unleashing the torrent of our nuclear arsenal.
Whether on radio, television or on campus, these people - so consumed by their emotions -advocate a course of action with no account of the true potential consequences. Words such as "strategic," "tactical" and "limited" are bandied about by their mouths as though these words combined with "nuclear strike" were anything less than oxymoronic.
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We speak of the terrorist attacks on New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania as "crossing the line." These were not military targets, they were civilian. Who do these people imagine a nuclear strike against the responsible party's nation would affect?
As citizens of the United States of America, we claim to subscribe to a higher morality than those who have attacked us. We claim to be the light of the civilized world. We claim to be the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If we choose to use nuclear weapons, all these claims are false. If we choose to use nuclear weapons, there will no longer be a line to cross. The United States is the only country that has used its nuclear capabilities, and the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lost more than a few buildings and 10,000 lives.
Our response to Pearl Harbor and Japanese aggression was not an eye-for-an-eye; it was everything-for-an-eye. On Tuesday, our losses were a true American tragedy and their effects can never be downplayed.
We cannot, however, retaliate to create another true American Atrocity. I can no longer dream, "It Can't Happen Here," but I can still hope, "It Can't Happen by Us."
Yes, we must strike back at those responsible. Yes, sadly, civilian lives will be lost because of it, but not by nuclear attacks. We are better than that, because we claim to be better than that.
The argument against nuclear weapons is best summed up by Hisayo Yaguchi, an 11th-grade survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima quoted in Dr. Arata Osada's "Children of the A-Bomb: the Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima."
"Falling down, we rise to our feet; again falling we rise again - the path which humanity follows is a thorny mountain path. Even though we stumble, we may not lie there where we fall. Eventually a beautiful pure spring will appear before our eyes. We must keep on walking until we are able to scoop up the clear spring water in our own hands. That is what it means to live."
Brian Cosbey
English Department
