I live 16 blocks from the former World Trade Center in which 50,000 people worked. On September 11, after the horrific terrorist attacks, I stood with neighbors at Thompson and Spring Streets and witnessed the buildings’ deadly collapse. I say passionately that in the midst of America’s grief and anger, there is nothing more urgent for people to know than what Ellen Reiss explains in the international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #1485 -- which can have Americans proud of how we meet this crisis and get the respect of our children and the whole world. 

The crucial question, Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, writes, is “How should we -- America and each of us -- see people?” I quote 6 passages from her commentary which you can read in its entirety on the website of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation (www.AestheticRealism.org) or call (212) 777-4490 to request a copy.

1)  The first crucial issue...is the issue every individual person faces when he or she is hurt: Do you want to think more deeply at this time, or do you want to feel that you don’t need to think and that since you’ve been hurt you have a right to do anything? 

The latter choice, Ms. Reiss explains is contempt, which Eli Siegel educator and founder of Aesthetic Realism defined as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Contempt is as common as a wife’s sarcasm or a child taunting another child, and is the cause of every injustice humanity ever committed -- racism, crime, terrorism. It can result, as we have seen, in mangled steel and vaporized concrete.

2)  Friends, fellow Americans, we need to see what contempt is! We need to learn from Aesthetic Realism about it and be sure we are against contempt, including in us. Otherwise we will meet contempt and ill will with contempt and ill will of our own, and that will be met with more contempt and ill will, and there will be a horrible, deadly, unending contempt cycle....[N]o punishment will succeed unless it is in keeping with what Mr. Siegel describes...: “The next war has to be against ugliness in self. And the greatest ugliness in self is the seeing of contempt as personal achievement. Contempt must be had for contempt before squabbles grow less, terror diminishes. Respect for what is real must be seen as the great success of man.” 

3)  [T]he way a person lives on the West Bank of the Jordan is inseparable from what may happen to us. We had better be interested in what that person feels, hopes for, and how he or she has been hurt. We had better want that person, or a person in Africa, Asia, South America, Europe, to be seen justly, by us and everyone. 

4)  [M]illions of people on every continent feel our country has seen the nations and human beings of this earth as things to be used for the profit of US corporations. “Not only,” people feel, “has America not been interested in what we deserve, in what is justice for us _ but America has tried, vehemently, to perpetuate a way of using us that is unjust, so profits could be made.” It is also felt by millions of people that Israel has not wanted to see a Palestinian as real, with feelings like one’s own, and that America has gone along with that lessening of Palestinian lives. Arabs, certainly, have also not wanted to see the feelings of a Jew as real. 

5)  Reports in the media these years have made clear that the militant Islamic fundamentalists who are bringing pain to the world in many ways now, were supported, funded, trained in the use of arms by the government of the United States. The US wanted to make sure various nations would not have an anti-profit government; we mightily assisted these militant fundamentalists so they could win out over anything Left....What...should be the basis of the choices our nation makes: profits for corporations, or justice for human beings? 

6)  Mr. Siegel said in the lecture on Discontent: “People will make the discovery that you can’t have a love nest or a comfy home in a discontented world....That will be ... an American discovery. And the year in which it will take place will be a happier New Year.” 

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