Dom Fox has asked me to forward this to the list, I include his prefatory
remarks to explain why this is so, I am aware of the sensitivity of
forwarded messages, but as Dom is a regular member I guess this is ok. These
be Dom's views, not necessarily mine, though I might agree with them
entirely.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "dominic.fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2002 1:00 AM
Subject: Re: "The Car Alarm"
David,
Could you possibly forward this to poetryetc (I need to resubscribe with my
new email address, and haven't got round to it yet)? Not that it's likely to
do much for peace, love and understanding, but it addresses something I
wanted to address anyhow...
regards,
Dominic
Frederick,
>I care more about 3000
> American dead than about 3000 dead elsewhere
That *is* odd, to me. Don't you have any friends "elsewhere" (I guess that
means "abroad", doesn't it)? Wouldn't you care more about someone blowing
them up than you do about the blowing up of Americans you've never met?
Fellow-countrypersonhood strikes me as a peculiarly arbitrary criterion for
an avowedly heartfelt preference; I'm not disputing your right to care more
about some people than others, but why that particular dividing line? What's
so special about Americans per se? If all the Americans had stayed home the
morning the WTC was hit and only foreign nationals had been working in the
building, would you have cared less?
It's also arbitrary, to some extent, to care more about one's own son than
one's neighbour's son; but I can understand someone's *feeling* that way,
even if I'd look a bit askance at their attempts to justify it rationally,
because that's how I feel too and I guess it's the way most people are set
up to feel. Patriotism doesn't make sense to me in the same way. There is
something that I wish to avow, and own, and defend as "my country", but it
doesn't have that kind of automatic instinctual prerogative when it comes to
my ability to empathise with other people. I don't quite know what would
have to happen to me for it to matter like that; perhaps you would say that
a devastating terrorist attack on London might do the trick, but to be
honest I doubt it: I'd be more likely to be influenced by a sustained public
campaign of vilification against anyone who professed to feel differently,
and we haven't had one of *them* in this country since Diana died.
Dominic
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