9/11 Miscellany

Some book related 9/11 miscellany:

Last night I watched the rebroadcast of the excellent PBS Frontline special Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero and noted the presence of Kanan Makiya, profiled in the Rights Readers selection, Calamities of Exile by Lawrence Weschler. The website offers an online interview with Makiya and poking around the site I also found this link to reflections by a number of authors on the legacy of 9/11.

And we can't forget another Rights Readers selection, Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights by William Schulz, former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. Turns out a few months back, Schulz gave a speech at the UC-San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice and its available via Google Video! So if you want the short version of the book, need an update, or (for those who are well acquainted) are otherwise feeling nostalgic for those Sufi anecdotes, here you go:

(Yeah! My first video post, just wanted to see if I could do this!) Technorati Tags: 9/11, William Schulz, Kanan Makiya

Remembering 9/11

The odd things that one remembers. On September 11, 2001, after taking in the news early in the morning I went to work as usual.  I parked my car and walking past Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall on the way to the office, I encountered a parent and child headed away from the building.  Looking relieved, they told me the courts were closed.  Their judgement day, maybe their own family tragedy, had been postponed by our national tragedy. Mostly what I remember though, is that our Amnesty International chapter had a letter-writing meeting that evening.  Because Caltech closed its campus, regretably, we had to cancel it.  Some of us obeyed the instinct to be in community anyway and gathered at our favorite discussion spot, Vroman's bookstore, to debrief the day's events over coffee, but I think we would have felt even better if we had been writing.  For this reason, I think I will always associate 9/11 with Amnesty letter-writing. 

Sometime later, I observed that even though many felt the world changed on that day, for our then prisoner of conscience case, a Tibetan monk, nothing changed at all.  He was still in prison and the shift in geopolitics wasn't going to affect him.  We still needed to make sure he wasn't a "forgotten prisoner."  Now we have adopted a different prisoner of conscience case, Eritrean Estifanos Seyoum.  In his case, the world did change that week, but not in a way that the rest of us noticed.  He was arrested on September 18, 2001 and although never officially charged or brought to trial and he has been held incommunicado since that time. We still need to make sure he isn't forgotten. I still want to obey that instinct to connect with a wounded world and offer some small token of healing.  I can't think of anything better to do today then take action on Estifanos Seyoum's case and visit Amnesty International's Action Center for more letters to write.

Tags: 9/11, Amnesty International, Eritrea, Estifanos Seyoum