If you’re in the Bay

If you’re in the Bay Area this evening, a group of people are planning to meet up for some remembrance in the AIDS Grove in Golden Gate Park at 5:30 pm. Here’s a map of Golden Gate Park detailing the location of the AIDS Grove.

A variety of articles related to the Current Situation that are worth reading, for one reason or another:

- Make it green by Roger Ebert
- Education of a Holy Warrior, NY Times Magazine 6/2000
- Hunting Bin Laden, Frontline report
- World War III, NY Times
- When will we learn by Harry Browne
- …not even in the USA can you have your cake and eat it too… by Sean Hartigan
- They can’t see why they are hated, Guardian Unlimited
- Death, Downtown by Michael Moore
- Life Going On by Dan Gillmor
- The Blame Game, The Economist
- Osama Bin Laden documents from The Smoking Gun
- America’s Place in the World, The Economist
- Terror in America by Robert Fisk
- The lesson of history: Afghanistan always beats its invaders by Robert Fisk
- *DO* worry about us. And, more to the point, U.S. by John Perry Barlow

I’m not necessarily endorsing any of the viewpoints expressed in the above articles, but - along with all of the coverage on TV and in the newspapers - they are definitely part of our collective education about this situation we find ourselves in.

I want to expand slightly on my statement of three days ago that “this is a human issue, not an American, democracy, or a freedom issue”. It’s not that America is the center of the world and, by extension, any problem that America has, the rest of the world has too. Certainly not. These terrorist actions are part of something larger than an “Attack on America”…that’s just too simplistic.

As a planet, we’re trying to deal with the consequences of the Cold War, living in a single superpower world, and the dramatically increased power of the small group & individual, as well as the age old problems of wealth, poverty, oppression, freedom, religious differences, and just plain getting enough food to eat for the people of your tribe without ruining things for the generation to come.

When you look closely at the various peoples of the world, we have many more similarities to each other than differences. We’re all dealing with the same problems, just from different perspectives. I just keep coming back to this photo of the earth rising over the moon taken by the Apollo 11 astronauts. Looking at that photo, the earth seems so small and fragile, like a soap bubble in the empty black of space, and I can’t help thinking that we’re all in this together, Americans, Afghanis, Saudi Arabians, New Yorkers, Australians, Israelis, blacks, whites, Asians, men, women, Moslems, Christians, atheists, Jews, etc., etc., etc.