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SISTERS OF HOLY CROSS
Regional Office
377 Island Pond Road
Manchester, NH 03109-4811
October 4, 2001
Dear President Bush:
We the undersigned, write to express our profound
sadness following the tragic events of Tuesday, September 11, that occurred
in our country. We also wish to express our sympathies to the families
and friends of the victims. We have great admiration for the
policemen and women, firefighters, rescue and relief workers, and
volunteers. We truly admire them for their remarkable courage and
valor.
We are in solidarity with you, Mr. President, in
viewing these terrorist acts as outrageous and deserving of
punishment. At the same time, we remain perplexed and concerned about
the cries for vengeance expressed by certain Heads of State. We fear
that such posturing, in favor of armed intervention, will serve only
to fuel an escalation of violence and will only add to the ravages
that have gone on in all corners of our globe for centuries. Once
again, innocent civilians will become the victims of our reprisals.
For this reason, we are insistent in the conviction that our country
should not associate itself with any movement that seeks justice
through violence.
We urge you to collaborate with the United Nations
so that those who encourage and perpetuate these inhuman acts may be
brought to justice. We emphasize the importance of a firm and
vigorous intervention, one that pre-empts the "taking up of
arms," which would only result in a rash of terrorist activities
that would be ever more incomprehensible and more cruel than before.
We believe that it is vitally important, before it
is too late, to awaken our sense of collective responsibility at every
level in addressing the root causes of what has engendered this
malice, this anger, and this hatred. More than ever, we need to seek,
in a very deliberate and intentional way, lasting solutions to the
great evils that afflict humanity: poverty, injustice, inequality, and
the incessant need to be dominant, one over the other.
May a spirit of justice, of peace, and of
reconciliation inspire your common efforts, as leaders, to adopt a
non-violent solution capable of overcoming terrorism and of creating a
culture of Peace based on egalitarian relations and on the equitable
distribution of the goods of the earth. It is a question of the
survival of our human dignity!
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