Do nothing?
11 days after watching in horror as thousands of innocent people were murdered in cold blood, our nation continues to search for something, anything, to help us heal. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but there is one thing that will provide a step in the right direction: requiring justice at the hands of those responsible. In a pool taken by the “Statesman”, students were asked how the U.S. should respond to the September 11th attacks. Some of the possible answers included military force, diplomacy, and nothing. While the overwhelming majority seemed to side with the use of military force, there was one individual that chose ‘nothing’. It is to this individual and people like him or her that I address this letter. I have heard Ghandi’s quote all too often in the past week: “An eye for an eye makes you blind.” There are individuals on our own campus and throughout the country that actually believe that doing nothing in response to these attacks will teach the terrorists some sort of lesson. What lesson do you think they will learn? Americans are cowards…Americans are all talk…Americans don’t take us seriously…we are too elusive for the incompetent Americans… To you pacifists on the campus of Utah State University: PEACE is something that is WON through war. Yes, it is a sad reality, but REALITY nonetheless. ‘Justice for all’ is not just an ideal saught by citizens of the United States for themselves, but in this case, a demand that all Americans must require of the terrorists responsible for the carnage that took place last week. We must speak the language of the terrorists for them to understand us, and that language is blood, death, and carnage. Nothing else will make them understand what we are trying to say: America will not stand by, or “peacefully protest” as thousands of our innocent citizens are murdered. Now that we know the language, it is time to make a statement…and we will.
Kody Nelson(435) 563-6511