the way to rainy mountain(2)

现代大学英语 精读

There exists no suitable analogy for those murdered building, for the thousands of lives snuffed out by suicidal terrorists armed with box cutters.

Our national flashpoint, but it is only one of many such flashpoints in history.

that powerful external forces have impinged upon human beings in a modern society, and it is not the first time those forces have been called evil.

Each time it seems the crisis must generate a new paradigm in which such an atrocity will never be allowed to happen again.

34,000 innocents who also happened to be Jewish were murdered a Babi Yar.

history is a gallery of unspeakable crimes

a human being with her skin burned off, a skeletal corpse embracing a childsize skeletal corpse.

A jet slicing through a skyscraper, a skyscraper collapsing upon itself

The nameless man an woman who plummeted, hand in hand, to their deaths form an upper floor of World Trade are caught in mind’s eye of history as eternally as the lovers solidified in ash after the eruption of Pompeii.

We turn to them obsessively, hoping to excavate their meaning

And that the pursuit of peace continues to be the noblest of vocations.

True Courage

From insecurity to confidence, from national paranoia to collective poise? Is our democracy so fragile that four airplane bombs can erode 225 years of liberty?

He and his fellow passengers did not let what must have been abject fear prevent them from acting-that is the true definition of courage.

Some of the men would rush the hijackers and force the airliner to crash, rather than allow it to be used in another suicide attack on Washington D.C., where it was surely headed.

While the condemned jet was aloft the ideal of American democracy also reached its apex. The rest of us can only strive to do as well. Fortunately, Tom Burnett’s last communication to the world was an unintentional gift to us all, a battle cry for the age of anxiety.

Let that consciousness not prevent us from acting in each other’s best interest, from trying to create a better, safer world.

As the ruins of the World Trade Towers smoldered at the southern end of Manhattan and the breeze stirred the ashes of thousands of human beings, a new age of anxiety was born. If someone had slept through September11 and awakened, Rip Van Winkle-like today, he would open his eyes on an astonishing new landscape.

Guardsmen toting M-16s are stationed at our airports. The president of the United States attends a Worlk Series game and the airspace over Yankee Stadium is closed, a line of snipers positioned on the stadium rooftop. The vice-president’s safekeepers whisk him from cave to cave halfway across the world. Anthrax panic sends Congress running from its chambers.

The events of the September11 divided our world into two radically different eras. We watch wistfully as the pre-9/11 world drifts away on its raft of memory, cast in secure (never mind that it was neither), we will speak of it in the reverent tones reserved for the dead.

Meanwhile, the post 9/11 era looms like an unmapped wilderness. As with other unclaimed territories throughout history, a fierce battle is being waged for its psychic, political and material capital. Former president Bill Clinton has called this conflict “the struggle for the

现代大学英语 精读

soul of the 21 century”, and the spoils of war include some of our most cherished values and liberties. Leading the charge are the warriors of the Bush Administration, a battalion of securitycrats and generals who are attempting to colonize the future with their own repressive agenda.

But there is a brighter side, a growing chorus of the dissenting voices who reject paranoia and hubris and question the rush toward becoming a security state. There is a dialectic afoot in the country, stirring of the peaceful purpose that has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which assumes the public is thinking in red, white and blue, when actually the spectrum of emotions, ideas and options is, like America itself, multihued.

Just before his death in November 2001, Ken Kesey described the state of the union in succinctly Keseyian terms: “The men in suits are telling us what the men in uniforms are going to do the men in turbans if they don’t turn over the men in hiding.” With the brutal, aggressively male way things had always been and “the timorous and fragile way thing might begin to be”. Like many Americans continue to do, Kesey nurtured great hopes for a future constructed on a model of mutual cooperation, trust and rational thinking.

The attacks in New York and Washington shattered the sense of invulnerability that is a hallmark of the American psyche. After 9/11, we looked at each other with new eyes, asked new questions. If you found yourself trapped in a doomed airplane with a cell phone in hand, who would you call? Pundits wrote that the country had lost its innocence, overlooking the fact that innocence is not a desirable quality in a superpower nation.

Overnight, the United States perceived a sword of Damocles suspended over its head and the ensuing waves of paranoia initiated surreal episodes: a nationwide run on gas masks; a demand form the Postal Service that all mail be irradiated against biological threats; and, most appalling of all, Op-Eds that declared using nuclear weapons against Muslim countries would be justified if terrorists killed so much as one more American.

Among the unavoidable truths to emerge from 9/11 is that being on U.S. soil does not render us immune from harm. The American people now have much more in common with millions of the planet’s citizens who spend their lives in regions where armed conflict or terrorism take innocent lives daily. We too are mired near the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, struggling to regain our lost sense of …… 此处隐藏：6009字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……