Good Samaritan nurses reach contract accord
<http://www.enterprise.southofboston.com/display/inn_news/News/news05.txt>
by Sean Flynn, Brockton Enterprise
September 14, 2001
BROCKTON ‹ The 275 nurses of Caritas Good Samaritan Medical Center have reached a tentative contract agreement that will give them raises totaling 14 to 16 percent over the next three years.
The amount of the raises varies, because some of the nurses will receive upgrades.
The nurses will hold an informational meeting to discuss details of the contract on Wednesday, and then vote whether to ratify it on Friday.
Those involved in negotiations do not anticipate problems with the contract's acceptance by the nurses.
"In general, we got some of the pieces we needed, and a fair raise to boot," said Wendy McGill, associate director for labor relations at the Massachusetts Nurses Association, which represents the nurses.
Eileen Flynn, an intensive-care unit nurse who co-chairs the bargaining committee, said the contract language puts some limits on the use of mandatory overtime and includes a commitment from the hospital to appropriately staff the units.
"We didn't complain that the hospital does not have enough nurse positions, although there have been some vacancies," said McGill. "Good Sam has always been progressive in offering incentives, and that took the burden off mandatory staffing."
McGill said the MNA still wanted contract language on staffing, because at some point the hospital management could change.
Flynn said she and the hospital's vice president for nursing services, Jody Fleit, have chaired a staffing committee that has met regularly during the past three years to discuss any problems that come up.
"It works quite well," Flynn said.
"We came to a good mutual agreement," she added. "This administration has worked hard to make things better for everyone involved."
Peter Holden, the hospital's vice president, said the negotiations went "very smoothly and professionally, and I anticipate a positive outcome."
Holden said he is glad employees feel the same way.
"Our employees are our greatest resource in fulfilling our common obligation, that of caring for the sick," he said.
Sean Flynn can be reached at sflynn@enterprisenews.com.
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16 weeks after going on strike, nurses return to work
<http://www.enterprise.southofboston.com/display/inn_news/News/news05.txt>
by Sean Flynn, Brockton Enterprise
September 18, 2001
BROCKTON ‹ For the first time in more than 16 weeks, Brockton Hospital nurses began returning to their jobs Monday.
Of about 450 regular full- and part-time nurses at the hospital, 420 had been on strike since May 25. Although the nurses ratified a new labor contract on Sept. 4, there was a 10-day notice period for the returning nurses to resume their jobs.
Robert Hughes, the hospital's vice president, said Monday that the hospital has confirmed 44 of the nurses are not returning, but the transition has been going smoothly.
"We will be filling gaps with local agency nurses," Hughes said. "We also have some new hires, but the number of nurses we hire will develop over time."
The hospital was staffed during the strike by traveling nurses provided by the U.S. Nursing Corp. of Denver and about 30 regular nurses who crossed the picket line.
The union believes things could have been somewhat smoother during the transition, but is hopeful the kinks will be worked out.
Joe-Ann Fergus, associate director of labor relations for the Massachusetts Nurses Association that represents the nurses, said nurses were not allowed to see the whole monthly schedule for all nurses.
"Quite a few people had conflicts," said Fergus.
Nurses could review the schedule in the past and switch shifts with other nurses if they had other jobs or commitments that conflicted with the schedule, she explained.
"We're going to give the administration that benefit of the doubt," Fergus added. "It was a chaotic time for them, but it would have been nice to see the schedules."
Fergus said the unexpected death of a nurse colleague, Roberta J. Berry, 34, of West Bridgewater, the mother of two young children, also saddened returning nurses. The funeral service for Berry, who had worked at the hospital since 1987, was held Monday.
Last week, the hospital held 15 orientation meetings for small groups of regular nurses.
Hughes said in addition to nurses getting reoriented, managers and non-nursing employees had to do so as well.
The hospital stressed during these meetings that threats, reprisals or harassment will not be tolerated.
"That applies equally to all of us," Hughes said. "Our primary purpose is to take care of patients, and we will unite around that."
Fergus said that was a welcome message for the union, since some nurses were concerned about the attitude of management.
The strike was prolonged because management and nurses could not agree on staffing language in the contract. The nurses wanted a commitment to full staffing at the hospital, while the hospital was concerned that an outside arbitrator would be able to dictate staffing levels.
But both sides say they are happy with the compromise.
"The nurses stood on a principle," said Fergus. "They did exactly what their practice and license called on them to do, to stand up for patients."
The hospital says it also acted in the interests of the patients, by protecting the hospital's sole right to determine appropriate staffing.
"The nurses are going back, doing their jobs, and being professional," said Fergus.
Dr. David Leiman, chief of the hospital's department of psychiatry, last week conducted a large group session for managers and offered smaller sessions to those who would like more discussion on the effects of the strike.
"All of the managers came in and ran through things they might be feeling, antagonisms, for example," said Hughes. "The discussion was about how to focus on the positive, so we can all get back to doing what we do best ‹ focusing on patient care."
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Editor¹s Note: The slash and burn Hunter Group now in Boston!
Beth Israel hires turnaround firm
<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/264/business/Beth_Israel_hires_turnaround_firm+.shtml>
by Globe Staff
September 21, 2001
In the latest sign of its financial distress, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will hire the Hunter Group, a hospital rescue company known for its aggressive tactics, to develop a recovery plan, and hospital executives are discussing large numbers of layoffs.
Interim chief executive Robert Melzer said yesterday that the Hunter Group, based in St. Petersburg, Fla., will provide three to four months of consulting for the Harvard teaching hospital beginning next month. The company has consulted to dozens of struggling hospitals and often recommends mass layoffs and reduction in services.
''They have a reputation that is formidable, and they have a track record of turning around other academic medical centers,'' Melzer said in a written statement. ''We believe they have a unique ability to help focus us on the difficult decisions we need to make, and we are unified in our commitment to restoring this great institution to fiscal health.''
Two hospital sources said yesterday that the steering committee appointed to develop a recovery plan for the hospital already is discussing layoffs. They said that management is considering laying off about 400 employees, although that number may change.
Beth Israel Deaconess, which is part of CareGroup, the state's second-largest hospital system, lost $32.7 million from operations during the first three quarters of 2001, compared to $38 million for the same period last year. The disappointing results led to the recent resignations of Beth Israel's president, Dr. Michael Rosenblatt, and CareGroup's chief executive, Dr. James L. Reinertsen.
LIZ KOWALCZYK
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
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Editor¹s Note: Donna Barron Howlett is tri-chair of the Carney Hospital local unit of MNA.
Encourage people to become nurses
by Donna Barron Howlett, RN, Quincy
September 22, 2001
We have all been saddened by the attacks on the United States of America. I am extremely concerned by the predicament we now find ourselves in.
Our men, women and children have been through a mind-boggling week. There are many weeks ahead of sights and sounds of this catastrophe.
My reason for writing is to encourage all who sneer or decline any interest in public service to rethink that. No amount of money or benefits could lure some to help in the way that these folks have.
The firefighters, policemen, EMS workers and all the others who have been eyewitness to the injuries and faces of death should be deemed heroes one and all. I also know that we the people are aware that there are physicians and nurses who are caring for the wounded and helping those sickened by the horrors.
My main reason for this note to you is to encourage people to become nurses. We have closed so many beds throughout the land because of financial constraints and HMO cuts, that we have very few unoccupied inpatient beds available.
To make room for this kind of emergency patient population and be up to speed for such a disproportionate myriad of injuries is no easy task. Yet, no one has thought this would happen, and here it is in New York and Washington DC.
One serious problem that we face as a nation that's not been mentioned is our lack of people attending nursing schools. We can always makeshift a hospital or clinic, but we need to staff it, too.
Copyright The Patriot Ledger
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Editor¹s Note: Alice Rothchild chairs the Massachusetts Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Health Care.
Caught in the anguish
<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/267/oped/Caught_in_the_anguish+.shtml>
by Alice Rothchild, Boston Globe
September 24, 2001
THIS YEAR MANY American Jews have been numbed by the escalating Intifada and the tensions in Israel and stung by events in New York and Washington. At the same time, some American Jews have approached the New Year with a growing sense of anguish and uncertainty around a central core of Jewish identity - our relationship to the state of Israel and in particular the policies of the Israeli government.
The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is reserved for self-reflection, renewing a commitment to a life founded on justice, and remembering and honoring the dead. In the tradition, repentance not only involves changing one's behavior, but also actively asking forgiveness from others.
For years, most American Jews have looked to Israel as a haven for victims of anti-Semitism and persecution, the only democracy in the Middle East, and a fulfillment of a long-held religious dream. Therfore, we are deeply troubled when we learn of increasingly militarized Jewish settlements in Gaza and bypass roads the width of football fields decimating olive groves while linking Jewish settlements in the West Bank, of Palestinian women humiliated at checkpoints by men in uniform, and Palestinian homes bulldozed as a form of collective punishment.
American Jews have generously poured money and support into the Jewish philanthropies that have helped build a strong and vibrant Israel. We have pressured our government to support Israel both economically and politically and contributed to a massive military buildup while promoting the Oslo Accords and not paying full attention to refugee rights and international law.
Jews who have a long history of struggling against oppression, of fighting for the displaced and dispossessed, find themselves in the uncomfortable position of supporting policies that many of us disagree with.
This New Year, while mainstream Jewish institutions are organizing solidarity rallies for Israel and voices are calling for war and revenge, many American Jews are asking painful, more personal questions:
Is it possible for Israel to be a democracy and a religious state? Will the power of the ultra-orthodox, and the fear and disappointment of the more moderate Jewish Israelis change this traumatized and weary people into a country that no longer reflects the Jewish values that have inspired us all? Is the intifada in some way a consequence of years of dispossession, closures, destruction of homes and orchards, and the humiliation of one people by another? Do political assassinations increase or decrease the number of suicide bombers? Is closure, which denies a whole population work, education, medical care, family contact, and enormously increases anger and hatred, an effective form of self-defense? Is the massively unequal distribution of water to Jewish settlers while Palestinian villages go dry, an appropriate distribution of scarce resources or a policy that breeds resentment and despair?
As American Jews reflect and shift uncomfortably in the face of these facts of occupation and with the knowledge that our enormous economic and military assets are not always balanced by an equal measure of wisdom and restraint, what does it mean to turn ones life toward justice, to make amends for that which is not defensible?
I am reminded of the beginning of the struggle against the Vietnam War, when any criticism of our troops was considered treason. I am reminded of a time when it seemed that apartheid in South Africa would last forever. This Yom Kippur, will American Jews have the courage to face the meaning and consequences of occupation, and to open their hearts to the narrative and aspirations of the Palestinian people who are also traumatized and weary?
Will American Jews take the lessons of social justice and human rights that are grounded in the Torah and in a long and powerful history and choose justice over the assumption that Israel is always correct and that military power can resolve this conflict?
Clearly in order to support all attempts to end the violence, we must support the end of violence in its broadest sense, from the suicide bomber to the state-run actions of occupation. We can as American Jews support our Israeli cousins and their Palestinian neighbors while honoring the needs of both people for secure, flourishing homelands. We can do this by supporting the growing number of Israelis committed to ending the occupation and by criticizing the strategies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
We have learned from other nations and from Jewish tradition that the first step toward coexistence is to acknowledge the historical narrative of the other. American Jews are in a position to publicly acknowledge the Palestinian refugee issue created during and after 1948, and the terrible human and economic price of 34 years of occupation.
In the spirit of the New Year, we can ask for forgiveness and make amends. As we recite the Yizkor, the remembrance of the dead, let us finally honor all the victims in this bloody struggle; from the firefighters and secretaries and travelers in New York, to the Jewish school children, the Palestinian babies, the young men who went to war filled with righteous fervor, and the families who have loved and lost them.
Alice Rothchild is a physician at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
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'Walking into hell a good summation'
<http://www.telegram.com/news/page_one/mdat.html>
by Martin Luttrell, Worcester Telegram & Gazette
September 24, 2001
WORCESTER-- The news media have referred to it countless times as Ground Zero, but for Dr. Gregory Ciottone and the 55 other members of the UMass Memorial Disaster Medicine Assistance Team, it's known simply as ³the pile.²
It comprises roughly four blocks in Lower Manhattan: smoldering, twisted metal, in some places more than 10 stories tall, where recovery crews cut away and move the unstable rubble to search for traces of bodies, personal effects and evidence.
The DMAT MA-2 team, as it is called, was the first medical team mobilized by the federal government to arrive at the scene of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, provide medical assistance and set up the five medical aid stations -- which are still being used. But instead of treating survivors, as they have been trained to do, the team cared for a steady stream of rescue and recovery personnel, the ongoing casualties of ³the pile.²
Hopes of recovering any additional survivors from the attacks, in which two commercial airliners flying out of Logan International Airport were hijacked and rammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, have been abandoned. More than 6,300 are believed to have died when the planes struck the buildings, causing the twin 110-story towers to collapse.
Photographs of the wreckage do not impart the scale of the devastation or the massive loss of life, said Dr. Ciottone and others on the disaster team, who returned to UMass yesterday. The team, which was mobilized hours after the morning attacks on the trade center and the Pentagon, saw its usual mission modified in the first days after arriving in New York.
Dr. Ciottone, director of the medical team, thought for several seconds when asked to describe the scene there.
³I can't,² he said. ³Walking into hell is a good summation. It was frustrating for us. There were no survivors. That's what we do. Everybody wants people to survive.²
He said working at Ground Zero is physically and emotionally draining:
The smoke and particulate matter is constantly assaulting your eyes, nose and lungs. It's hard when you're treating a firefighter and he pours out his soul to you about another firefighter he pulled out of the rubble.
There's a great sense of camaraderie there. Everybody there is like a family. We saw the kinds of injuries you might expect from people climbing around in an unsafe area. Lots of cuts and some burns. Some serious trauma.
It's just immense. There will be people working on that pile for the next seven or eight months. It's awesome. The aerial scenes give you some sense of the scope. It's hard to imagine.
The team arrived home at 12:40 p.m. aboard a dark-blue Silver Fox motor coach that pulled into the south parking lot at UMass. About 100 family members, friends and co-workers clapped, cheered and waved American flags.
William Kenneway, 22 months old, wore a floppy hat and a T-shirt that said, ³My Mommy is my hero,² while his father, Seth, held him, waiting for the bus to stop.
Some people in the throng waved to loved ones seen through the tinted windows, and weeping, rushed to embrace them as they stepped off the bus.
Alison Kenneway, an emergency room and Life Flight nurse, hugged and kissed her husband and son, then spoke about her experiences while being greeted by co-workers:
³We set up mini-emergency rooms. We were capable of taking care of any type of injury,² she said. ³We saw a lot of eye injuries from the smoke and particles in the air. It's still smoldering, and the heavy equipment raises a lot of dust. A lot of people came in with lacerations, chest pains and some burns. There were lots of foot problems, blisters, from people working there who haven't taken their boots off.
³The pile. It's four city blocks. Just a pile of twisted metal. It's still smoking, and parts will burst into flame now and then. It might be from the gas tanks of cars under there.²
Medical stations were set up in the lobby of the American Express tower near the Trade Center, at a deli and in other nearby buildings. After a few nights of sleeping on cots, the team was moved into a hotel that donated rooms, she said.
³Most of the time I was exhausted,² she said. ³I got a chance to see a show on Broadway, so I went to see 'Beauty and the Beast.' I had never seen the movie. It sucked me right in. I paid total attention. When I walked back outside, it was back to reality.²
Dr. Ciottone said the tragedy in New York had similarities to the Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse fire of December 1999, for which the disaster team mobilized.
³I remember how the warehouse fire tore the community apart,² the Shrewsbury native said. ³It's an immense heaviness.
³It was stressful for a number of reasons,² he said. ³We're used to plopping our tents down and treating casualties. This time, there, we didn't. There were only a few survivors.²
M. Christopher Couch, a UMass paramedic, said nothing in his training, even an enlistment in the Navy, could prepare him for the magnitude of the devastation:
Outside the front door of one medical station was Ground Zero. There was a crane parked right there. We had unrestricted access to the pile, but we didn't venture out there much. It was too dangerous. It's 10 to 15 stories tall, and there are several levels under it.
We had a welder who got second- and third-degree burns. He was cutting through metal and hit a gas pocket. We saw lots of people with flash burns.
I found someone's personal photographs on the street. They looked like they could be on someone's desk. It was hard because you ask yourself, ³Where are they? Will their families ever find out what happened to them?²
I have nightmares. I don't look at a tall building anymore and just see a building and sky. I see blown-out windows. I took more than a dozen rolls of film, but nothing can describe it. Just imagine being at ground zero of a nuclear blast. People can't get their minds around it. There's no point of reference.
People around the city yelled their appreciation and held signs for the medical team and other relief personnel, he said.
³There were people holding signs on the West Side Highway, calling us heroes,² he said. ³We're not the heroes. We're doing what we were trained to do,² he said. ³The heroes are the ones still working on that pile, and those who are buried under it.²
©2001 Worcester Telegram & Gazette Corp.
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Pope Decries Wars Over Faith
by Sharon LaFraniere, Washington Post
September 24, 2001
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, Sept. 23 -- In a special prayer at the end of an open-air Mass, Pope John Paul II today urged Christians and Muslims to react to growing international tensions by working together for peace, saying, "religion must never be used as a reason for conflict."
"We must not let what has happened lead to a deepening of divisions," the pope said in the capital of this former Soviet republic in Central Asia. "With all my heart I beg God to keep the world in peace."
His words held special meaning for many of the nearly 20,000 people who read from prayer booklets and waved yellow flags from behind blue iron barriers as the frail pontiff celebrated Mass before a simple wooden altar under sunny skies in the town's central square.
Although Kazakhstan has so far escaped the Islamic extremism that troubles some of its neighbors, its citizens fear that a war in nearby Afghanistan could upset the religious harmony among the many faiths and nationalities in this vast land of barren steppe and mountains between Russia and China.
"We are afraid, very afraid," said Galina Kim, 26, a teacher who took an overnight train from her village in southern Kazakhstan. "It's not far away. We already see refugees. We don't even want to think about it, because if there is a war, it will be the last war."
The Mass was attended by an unusual mix of Muslims, Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholics and people of no particular faith. Their nationalities were even more diverse, a reflection of the more than 2 million people deported to Kazakhstan by Joseph Stalin.
Catholics appeared to be in the minority, although special trains transported believers from hundreds of miles away. Fewer than 2 percent of Kazakhstan's 15 million people are Catholic. While the Catholic church has won converts since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, they roughly equal the number of Catholics leaving Kazakhstan for their homelands.
Priests in white robes carried half-full bowls of communion wafers, scanning the smaller-than-expected crowd for takers. The crowd was gently reminded over a loudspeaker that it is a sin to accept communion without first confessing one's sins, "preferably to a Catholic priest."
The 81-year-old pope sought to include all faiths in his message of peace and reconciliation. "I wish to make an earnest call to everyone, Christians and the followers of other religions, that we work together to build a world without violence, a world that loves life, and grows in justice and solidarity," he said in a final prayer repeated in German, English, Russian and Kazakh and not included in his prepared text.
John Paul's first visit to Kazakhstan -- the 95th foreign trip of his pontificate -- is significant in several respects. Like Syria, where he traveled in May, Kazakhstan is predominantly Muslim, and a good setting for the pope's call for harmony among religions.
Like Ukraine, which he visited in June, Kazakhstan is on Russia's doorstep, and a substitute for the Russian visit he cannot make. Much of the former Soviet Union adheres to Eastern Orthodoxy, which broke from Roman Catholicism in 1054. John Paul hopes to mend the rift, but Russian Patriarch Alexei II has kept the pope from his Russia. Alexei is now in Armenia but plans to leave before the pope arrives there Tuesday.
Kazakhstan is also of interest to John Paul as a former Soviet state. The pontiff, who used the Vatican's financial and moral authority to challenge communism in his native Poland, repeatedly congratulated Kazakhstan on its 10 years of independence, urging people to cherish their freedoms.
Finally, Kazakhstan is where the pope's close friend, Vladislav Bukovinsky, was exiled as a Polish priest and tried to minister to Catholics from one of Stalin's camps. Bukovinsky, who was imprisoned three times, is buried in Karaganda, the center of Kazakh Catholicism. The pope hoped to visit Karaganda, 160 miles from Astana, but the government objected, apparently because officials considered the city too downtrodden.
Vatican observers said the pope overrode his security advisers' concerns to make this four-day trip, which put him roughly 1,000 miles from the Afghan border. The pope was shot by a Turkish terrorist in Rome in 1981, and a second assassination plot in the Philippines was foiled in 1995. Philippine officials have established links between those Manila conspirators and Osama bin Laden, the Islamic extremist in Afghanistan blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The pope alluded to security concerns tonight at Astana's Eurasia University when he advised students to "experience difference not as a threat but as an enrichment" and to focus on the good they can create more than the evils in Kazakhstan's past. "I was told many times that this trip would not be possible because of what happened in the U.S.," he said. "I am very happy I am in this part of the world now."
So was Andrei Yermashov, an unemployed 37-year-old who came by train from Karaganda to attend the Mass. Yermashov, who said he hopes to be baptized soon, praised the pope as a beacon of peace and reason.
If the United States attacks Afghanistan, he said, "nobody will take any steps here, but slowly this negative attitude will be developing among Muslims, maybe, because the United States is a Christian country. John Paul II is calling on us to create peace."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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God wills it? No, God doesn't
<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/268/oped/God_wills_it_No_God_doesn_t+.shtml>
by James Carroll, Boston Globe
September 25, 2001
WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH used the term ''crusade'' last week, his spokespeople quickly disavowed it, and with good reason. But far from being a long-ago history that we can blithely abjure, the Crusades created a state of consciousness that still shapes the mind of the West, and if Americans don't know that, many Muslims do. We should take the president's inadvertent remark as an occasion to think about that.
Scholars count eight Crusades as having taken place in the 200-year period between 1096 and 1291. They were wars waged against Islam for control of what Christians called the Holy Land, but they also involved fierce conflict between Latins and Orthodox, and ultimately within Latin Christendom itself. It is not only that the savagery of these wars remains unforgotten in vast stretches of the world today, but also that the lines they drew remain contested borders even now - as the Balkans wars of the 1990s reveal. There are at least four key pillars of the Western mind that the Crusades put in place.
The Crusades were the first time that violence was defined by the church as a sacred act. ''God wills it!'' was the battle cry with which Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade in 1095. Anyone ''taking the cross'' to fight the infidel was offered indulgences, and, if killed, assured a place in heaven. The energy for war came from the conviction that, as President Bush put it in his address to Congress, ''God is not neutral.'' Crusaders go to war certain of God's blessing.
The crusading mind divides the world between Us and Them. Indeed, the Crusades were a deliberate effort to get Europe's princes to stop making war against each other in favor of war against an enemy outside, and it worked. The Crusades established a binding ideological consensus among Christians that led ultimately to unifying structures of politics and culture. Indeed, Europe did not become ''Europe'' until it defined itself against Islam, and that negation remains embedded in the West's self-understanding today.
But a mobilization against an enemy outside inevitably led to a paranoid fear of enemies within. Anyone not participating in the new consensus was instantly in danger. The war against Islam abroad became a war against dissent at home. That is why ''schismatics,'' or Orthodox Christians, and Albigensian heretics were soon targets of Crusades, too.
But the ultimate enemy within, of course, was the Jew. The movement from religious anti-Judaism of the early church toward the lethal anti-Semitism of modernity took its most decisive turn with the First Crusade, which was the occasion, in the Rhineland in the spring of 1096, of the first large-scale pogrom in Europe's history. Church leaders repudiated violence against Jews in subsequent Crusades, but without ever repudiating the underlying theological assumptions that made it inevitable. Leaders today decry a generalized hatred of Muslims, but the character of their war against terrorism may make it inevitable. Here are the questions this history puts to us:
Can we respond to this crisis without once more dividing the world between ''Us and Them''? Is it wise, for example, for America to insist on a global choosing of sides, what Islam can hear as the same old call to arms? Can we not more subtly enlist the support of those caught in the middle, like Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf or other Arab (sic) leaders, without igniting their populations against them?
Must we define this conflict in the cosmic - and self-justifying - language of good versus evil? As is true of every human conflict, this one is morally ambiguous. There was no ambiguity about the evil of the Sept. 11 assaults, but they arose out of a complicated set of prior conditions, some of which involve our own moral culpability. America must act in this crisis in the full knowledge of its own capacity for deadly mistakes and evil acts. America must not define self-critical moral reflection as disloyalty.
Is war our only possible response to this crisis? In addition to bringing terrorists to justice, wouldn't we do well right now to initiate a massive, long-term effort to address the ultimate source of terrorism - the radical impoverishment of millions of people, especially in the Arab world, especially in the West Bank and Gaza? Can more come from America than cruise missiles and MTV?
The only way ''this crusade, this war on terrorism,'' in the president's phrase, will not be a replay of past crimes and tragedies is if we repudiate not just the word ''crusade,'' but the mind of the Crusader. We can start by acknowledging, above all, that when humans go to war, God in no way wills it.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
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