I want to add to Cynthia's note about how people can be loving toward their
close group and still hateful, or even hate-filled, toward others.

I am the last to have anything positive to say about mass murder (you guys
will recall that I live in NYC and my husband works 3 blocks from the world
trade center).   But when I hear folks (off and on LN) describe the hijackers
as motivated by pure hatefulness, I don't think it's an effective way of
understanding them.   It seems clear that they were motivated at least in
part by great, selfless love -- but love of values that do not include the
sanctity of human life, which is itself one of *my* values.

I am reminded of a letter from the time of the American Civil War, which was
read as part of the documentary television series on that war a few years
ago.  Sullivan Ballou was killed fighting for the Union (the north, folks) at
Gettysburg, and the night before the battle he wrote to his wife.  The first
paragraph tells her how much he loves her, how he longs to return to her
safely.  But, he wrote in the second paragraph, "love of country fills me
like a great wave," and his devotion to his country -- and to the values of
it, which in his case had to do both with political union and also abolition
of slavery -- makes him *cheerfully willing* to sacrifice even the chance of
a happy future with her in support of it.

I abhor the kind of attack involved last week, and I abhor the abhorrence of
personal freedoms that seems to be one of the values underlying it.   But I
don't see that that even the most loving possibly relationship with those
close to me determines what political values I'm going to support.  And as
much as I abhor the hijackers, and as much as I dread some of the possible US
responses to them, I agree with both the hijackers and many of the US service
people opposing them in that I do think that there are some values worth
fighting, and even dying, and probably even killing, for.

And as to which values those are, I don't think that breastfeeding gives us
those answers.  The personal is only partly political.  I don't think
breastfeeding is historically in any way associated with pacifism, or even
with supporting relatively nice cultural values.   The Nazis gave awards for
motherhood.

Elisheva Urbas, NYC
you'll excuse me if I'm a little grim right now, but I'm trying to be clear
eyed

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