Stephen Downes

Just last week I wrote about my experiences on the Internet: about the beauty I found in the people there and the hope that I felt for the future. In the wake of this week's events, last week feels like a very long time ago indeed.

Though to be sure as the week progressed I saw much more to admire than to despise. The courage of the firefighters and police who rushed into the doomed towers to save their fellow citizens. The selflessness of passengers in an airliner who chose to crash the plane rather than risk it hitting yet another building. The people who rushed to give blood. And more, so much more.

But of course their actions are overshadowed by those few who, for whatever reasons they felt were right, planned and executed the deliberate destruction of the World Trade Center, the massacre of thousands of people in New York and Washington, the scarring of the millions of lives touched by these events. Including mine.

Tuesday began like any other day and changed only when I flipped channels, as I usually do at seven, from A-Channel to Canada A.M. But as I passed channel six I saw on the screen the World Trade Centre, a gaping hole in its side, being broadcast on the local CBS affiliate. The commentator talked of how a twin engine aircraft had struck the building. I thought of a similar case in the past when an airplane hit the Empire State Building. I marvelled at how well the World Trade Center was built because it hadn't collapsed from the impact.

As I watched a second aircraft came into view for a split second and then a fireball erupted from the second tower. "Whoa," was all I could say, and then the realization: this was no accident.

But life goes on.

I was in the shower as people jumped from the twin towers to their deaths. I remember thinking about how odd it was to be taking a shower at such a time, not because I knew people were leaping from the building - I didn't - but because I knew they would be desperately trying to escape at that very moment.

Before I left home I posted a headline on NewsTrolls. I was on the bus heading to the university campus when the first tower collapsed, and just getting off the train when the second tower came down.

When I arrived at my office to see the posts on NewsTrolls, the news on Yahoo (the CNN website was dead and never did recover), and the emails from Pasty and Hack from New York, any semblance of an ordinary day went out the window. As they reported from the streets of Manhattan, I tried to find background and other information I knew they wouldn't have time to find.

I watched it all on an ABC news feed on my desktop computer, reloading Yahoo and the National Post and the Globe and Mail every couple of minutes, feeding NewsTrolls, updating the headline, adding photos and links. I watched and reported for two days from my home and my office in Edmonton.

Today is another day and I woke up, watched the news, had a shower, took the bus and the train to the University campus, sat down at my desk, wrote some code for a while, read my email, and had lunch. Far away, in New York, Pasty is still counting her dead co-workers. Emails come from friends and acquaintances who live in NYC or who have friends and relatives there.

How can I even go on?

The United States, the news tells me, is going to "do generations a favor by coming together and whipping terrorism." No doubt they will go after the people who organized and launched this horror; they may also get a few of their friends and colleagues for good measure. Perhaps they'll bomb Afghanistan, perhaps there will be something like a trial and conviction. Security will be increased, new laws will come into place, and perhaps, some day, the American people will feel they have extracted some measure of revenge.

The Pentagon and the World Trade Center will be rebuilt, too. Perhaps not exactly as they were, perhaps not even in the same location, but rebuilt for sure, because the functions they serve need still to be filled, and the thousands who perished will by the by be replaced: not exactly, and never in the hearts of their family and friends, but by fellow citizens stepping up to take over when a comrade has fallen.

The United States, the world, will go on.

But so will the Arabs, the Palestinians, and so will the many other peoples of the world who in this day still feel the only means open to them is to raise a fist or a gun or a bomb in anger. Today, unabated, the explosions continue in Jerusalem and the West Bank, rocket fire rains on Kabul, street fighting erupts in Nigeria, and more, countless more, conflicts large and small fester and simmer.

And as the Israelis know - they must know, right? - no amount of security will stop the sort of horror that happens when individuals throw away their lives with as much violence and as much cost as possible. If today a bomb explodes in Jerusalem (as it did, today or yesterday), the terrorist eluded one of the most sophisticated military and intelligence services in the world, infiltrated a small and heavily guarded country, entered one of the most secure cities in the world, and blew himself up.

As the makers of laws know - they must know, right? - the only real way to enforce a law in a land, no matter how free or how repressive, is to instil in the people a desire to abide by the law. Average people do not refrain from murder (or even theft, extortion or kidnapping) because they fear they will get caught: they refrain because these actions are wrong. And extreme actions, such as flying a hijacked airliner into the side of a crowded office building, are unspeakable.

What sort of punishment could be applied, even assuming the perpetrators are caught? You cross a street illegally, you get a ticket, you pollute a river, you get a fine, you commit securities fraud, you get a larger fine, you break into an office, you get jail, you kill a man, you get more jail or even execution, you ram an airliner into the World Trade center, you get...? To even contemplate a punishment puts it into our normal system of justice and retribution, and yet, no retribution is sufficient, because any retribution makes the act seem fathomable.

We will catch, try and convict those responsible because we need to. But to expunge such crimes, to push them into the annals of human history, we need to go beyond that. We have to address the fundamental weaknesses of a global society in which some people - some entire peoples - think that it is legitimate to perpetrate massive, horrific, murder.

And as last week's failed conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, showed, there's no easy answer. Because the complaints of entire peoples, entire races of people, rise up amid our efforts at collective self-civilization. Right or wrong, the cries of the Palestinians overwhelmed all other discussion. Right or wrong, the plaints of Africans suffering from colonialism and past slavery drown out all other voices. Right or wrong, North American aboriginals' pleas to save their culture supersede our desires for quiet, civilized discussion.

When an entire people loses hope, it does not matter how justified or not their collective grievances are, they soon fall outside the bounds of rule by law and justice. Indeed, they see rule by law and justice themselves as nothing more than a means of keeping them in their place, of silencing their hopes and dreams, of dooming them, their nation, their culture, their religion, their civilization, to historical oblivion. Small wonder, then, that the normal sense of right and wrong ceases to apply.

I see in the discussion lists and email today many statements running along the same theme: we can't let them win. Oh yes, and I certainly agree with that, because when terror wins, civilization retreats, sometimes (as the Romans discovered) forever. We can't let them win, but we have to be very careful about what counts as "letting them win" and what does not.

Some people, for example, think we should say things like, "to Hell with the Palestinians" because now any concession is seen as a victory for the terrorists. This seems to me to be the stance adopted in Israel, and was for many years (in some quarters still is) the stance adopted in Northern Ireland. It's a stance I heard expressed by many people here in Edmonton in response to the First Nations stand-off at Oka a few years ago.

One wonders what would have become of the German and Japanese people, though, if after military victory our rule had been characterized by means of repression and restriction instead of reconciliation and rebuilding. One wonders what would become of South Africa were the wisdom of Nelson Mandela not present to carry that people through a process of Truth and Reconciliation rather than, say, an exacting of just revenge for a century of repression and exploitation. What would have become of the Russian people were the western world to turn their backs on their enormous needs after the fall of the Soviet regime?

It's not that we don't know what to do, it's that we are sometimes too close and too blind with rage to see our way clear to do it.

We must not let our rage blind us to the work that must be done. We must not let the weight of our fallen friends and family deter us from our path. And on this day, we must remember that the closed fist on the right is and must always be balanced by the open hand on the left. To do anything else lets them win, it perpetuates a world in which their way, a violent and horrific way, is the only way.

Tomorrow morning I will get up at 6:30, watch the news, and have my shower just after seven. I will catch the number 12 bus across from the Boston Pizza on 118th Street, then catch the train to the University downtown. I'll walk a few blocks to my office, site down, read my email, write, research, code, teach and will myself toward a better world.

Tomorrow morning. There's so much work to do, and only a lifetime in which to do it.