Peaceful Tomorrows

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, Jan. 7, 2002

Swords, Plowshares and 9/11 Steel
By CLYDE HABERMAN

MAKE no mistake, Rita Lasar said. She would have opposed this brewing war
against Iraq even if her brother, Abraham Zelmanowitz, had not died at the
World Trade Center. But he did die there, and that painful reality, she
said, stoked an antiwar passion that might otherwise have stayed dormant.

"I don't want terror rained on other people to avenge my brother's death,"
Ms. Lasar said the other evening in her East Village apartment. "And I
don't spend any time thinking about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and what
I want to do to those people. It's irrelevant at this point. What's
relevant is not having other innocent people die because my brother died."

Ms. Lasar, a 71-year-old widow, is well aware that her stance is a
distinctly minority view, among Americans in general and, no doubt, among
relatives of the Sept. 11 victims in particular. All the same, it is
probably not a crime against democracy to note that, agree with them or
not, some of the relatives feel that the country is on a misbegotten path
toward war.

A few have banded together in a group called Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful
Tomorrows. They are, Ms. Lasar says, maybe 50 in all, representing about 35
of the 3,000 victims at the trade center and the Pentagon and on the doomed
planes.

A very small group indeed. But it is yet another sign, as if one were
needed, that Sept. 11 relatives come in many shapes and sizes and political
opinions, despite a common tendency to bunch them all together in a
homogenized mass known as "the families."

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/07/nyregion/07NYC.html


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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