In the wake of events in New York and Washington, I have the urge to found
some new political action groups. Mothers against Symbolism. Mothers Against
Religion and Ideology. Mothers against the Afterlife. And finally, Mothers
Against Indiscriminate Revenge.

Mothers Against Symbolism is dedicated to the proposition that the World
Trade Center was a building. Not a symbol of American power or riches or
world domination. It was a big building full of people. (Two, in fact.) So,
for that matter, was the Pentagon.

If the terrorists wanted to destroy a symbol, they should have gone for the
Statue of Liberty. At night. They could paintballed the Washington Monument.
But even if they destroyed those symbols, they could not have destroyed the
ideas they stand for. What can be destroyed are buildings and people. And
that's what they have done.

By this act, the terrorists have destroyed what is most sacred to me. That is
human life. To me, any ideology or religious belief that makes something MORE
important than human life, is anti-sacred and I am against it. And if the
belief in an afterlife makes people more inclined to kill and die, I am
against that too.

At the college where I teach, people are walking around with red eyes and
broken hearts asking each other, Did you lose someone? For so many of us the
answer is no, but yes. As members of what turns out to be an American family,
we are wondering who is going to read the bedtime stories, who is going to
kiss the booboos, even who is gonna walk the dog -- not to mention who is
going to explain all this. This is why people are waiting for hours to give
blood. Why former New Yorkers like myself keep feeling we need to go home and
help clean up. Why almost no one can think without tears of the children of
New York and Washington, of the husbands and wives of the flight crews, the
passengers with the cell phones in their hands.

I beg our president, please, for god's sake, don't kill any more innocent
people. Don't try to relieve our suffering by spreading it. Don't make our
"freedom" the equivalent of whatever those conspirators believed in. Families
in Kabul are no more guilty of this crime than families here in Glen Rock,
and we are all part of a bigger family, a world family.

I do not mean this in a symbolic way.