The Logic Off Topic list

Hendrik Jan Veenstra <h@...> wrote:
>Thoughts from the mind of Kool Musick, 9/20/01:
>
> >100 aircraft are now flying
> >out Saturday to Kuwait, and her son is amongst them. She is sincerely
> >terrified that she will never see him again. What do I say to her?
>
>... and what do you say to the tens of thousands of innocent
>Afghanistan citizens, most of them dead-poor,

etc etc

I do not know those thousands of innocent Afghanistan citizens and you have 
not right to presume that I do not care about them.
I only know the person I referred to.
I tried to keep the minimum of politics and the maximum of humanity in my 
message.
Please do not impute to me motives I do not have, nor imply to me that 
there are issues I am not aware of, and that I or others have not thought of.
I am happy to debate them with you in private if you wish.
This particular thread began with someone berating the entire LUG community 
for not having responded to him when he wrote in here, and that matter I 
was trying to deal with.

>... Bush thinks cowboy language like "smoke them out of
>their holes" and "wanted: dead or alive" is an appropriate response
>to the current events?

The word 'Bush' did not appear anywhere in my messages.
I just spoke about myself, personally, and the fears that I personally have 
in respect of people that I actually know. Everytime they increase the size 
of the list of victims at the WTC my palms sweat and I look to see if my 
friends are amongst them. It was on that personal level that the original 
poster wrote and it was no that personal level that I tried to respond, to 
let him know that even though there may be 6200 posters here at the LUG we 
are all human and we DO care. The thrust of your entire email is basically 
that those of us currently resident in the USA do not care about their 
fellow human beings in Afghanistan and I for one resent that implication.

>My heart bleeds for all those killed, or all who've lost relatives...
Then please just stick to posting such things; for it is basically all that 
most us have said. Once you start rabitting on about Bush and his policies 
you are sure to provoke an argument. Pakistan is not the only place on the 
brink of civil war. You are perfectly well aware that many people in the 
USA support what Bush is doing while a very substantial number disagree 
with it. Why should anyone, especially on a music list, want to put a 
burning match into a tinder box like that?

>But despite the enormity of this tragedy, it would prove a positive
>point about our so-called western democratic, humanitarian ideals if
>we could all keep seeing things in persepctive.
Thank you ... but I do not think that it was I who was not seeing things in 
perspective. My message had a very specific and narrow aim and to that 
narrow aim I restricted myself.

>The sadness never stops...
And all I did was try to make that sadness easier to bear for someone who 
wrote into this List and said that he was feeling bitter. I absolutely did 
not try to increase the amount of rancour and bitterness in the world. 
There are already plenty enough of people doing that.

I cannot speak for anyone else but I did not find your message in the least 
helpful to me; and nor did I find it in the least compassionate.

Kool Musick
Keep Musick Kool


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