Teachable Moment While there is an urgent need to promote peace, this is also an opportunity to promote diversity. Indeed, they are related. --It is a good time to look at ripple effects and connections. --More than 1/3 of the people killed in the World Trade Center on September 11 were not Americans. They were citizens of 70-80 other countries. Hundreds were Muslims. --More than 40% of residents of New York City are foreign-born. --The 4,500 dead and missing and 6,000+ treated at hospitals in New York City, and several hundred more at the Pentagon and in the Pennsylvania crash, have families and friends--if each one has only 10 family and 10 friends, that's 250,000 people directly connected to the injuries and deaths, in shock and mourning for their personal loss and grief--but of course the number is much larger. If there was a funeral every day, it would be 20 years of going to funerals. --Many Americans apparently do not know about the differences between Muslim and Hindu, or Arab and Muslim, not to mention Sikh and Coptic Christian, much less between terrorist and fellow-citizen. Many do not make any distinctions, do not care about making distinctions. --Americans are notoriously bad at knowing geography and languages, cultures and religions. Now, the situation cannot be understood without knowing about Kashmir, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Iraq, for starters, not to mention the internal conflict in Afghanistan, the nuclear bomb tests by India and Pakistan, and how the United States, the largest weapons dealer in the world, provided missiles to the Mujaheddin in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union that some people fear may be used against the U.S. --I recall the corporate audiences in New Jersey who told me that more than 20% of Americans are Jews. The correct figure is 2-3%. Many African-Americans, part of a group that is 13% of the population, do not recognize Jews as a minority group. There are about 3.5 million Arab Americans and about 3-5 million Muslims (there's no accurate count) in the USA. Should it matter how large or small a group is to be covered by the Bill of Rights, by basic American principles? I think we should volunteer to be resource people in local schools. Get people to look at globes and maps. Help people talk to each other. The most powerful thing for me this week was a woman wearing a scarf who said she is not Muslim but was wearing the scarf to feel closer to Muslim women. This reminded me of the story of people in Denmark wearing a yellow star in solidarity with Jews, the scene in "Spartacus" when one man after another declares "I am Spartacus," the people in Billings, Montana, who put pictures of menorahs in their windows after a Jewish home was attacked in 1993. People are using American flags as symbols for many kinds of feelings. A friend of mine was told to wear red, white, and blue ribbons by her co-workers, and then was strongly urged to go to church with them--though she is Muslim. A company asked employees to wear red, white, and blue clothes to work. I imagine a confrontation between people with the American flag and people with the UN or Earth flag, all of them intense patriots. Maybe patriotism is also learning to live and work (that is, to talk and listen) with people who are not like us, who do not wear the same cross around their neck, who do not cover their head with the same baseball cap--though, come to think of it, I heard that 44% of Major League baseball players were not born in the U.S. either. September 22, 2001  BACK