Department News
Dr. Flaherty Speaks at UIC's Day of Rememberance
http://www.uic.edu/homeindex/remembrance.html

Chancellor Manning has given me the terrible honor to make a few comments about faculty response to this tragedy.

This Wednesday we held a panel discussion on the bombing and reactions to it, someone asked me what to say, I said it really wasn't critical...there was and is something in us as uniquely social beings that needs to come together in times of intense crisis and fear and loss… to affirm our humanity, to reduce our anxiety and to satisfy a primordial drive for comfort in the collective embrace. This works incredibly well.

We find ourselves on the receiving end of sympathy as a country in a way we have never experienced. We are moved from the calls and emails from friends and colleagues around the world …yet it feels both comforting and disquieting to us.

And so we are here today
Dealing with the loss together
Over the last 72 hours, we have all gone through phases of response-collectively and individually.

At first all we could do is stare at the burning towers and go outside to blue and placeless sky. It was surreal…like some awful and eerie movie
We wanted, no we needed, to do something…anything, donate blood, call friends- Not do Nothing. There is an abject agony and pain in being passive in the face of trauma…

There was also another feeling emerging - to avenge the death of these victims… We may believe what Gandhi said, "if you follow the rule of an eye for an eye soon the world will go blind" but we also had that dark, rageful and yet very human desire for revenge.
I read today's Tribune and was dismayed to hear about protesters and acts of violence against Muslim Americans and Muslim places of worship. We must condemn these actions and do whatever we can to prevent the world from going blind. This is a time for tolerance and coming together, not tearing apart... I am heartened to see the government moving deliberately and yet rationally. Remember we did not bomb Arizona because of Timothy McVeigh.

By day 2 the depth of the human suffering began to hit most of us- the calls from the plane, the families carrying pictures of loved ones, the firefighters that burned to death, and all their children-it is truly overwhelming…and moves us to tears..Yet this we can finally relate to-.we have all experienced loss-…this is as close as many of us have come to a holocaust and we will live with it forever.

There is the concern for how this event it will affect our way of life- did the terrorist strike to the heart of our country's cherished freedom? Certainly there is a loss of innocence- in Wordsworth's terms "there has passed away a glory from the earth"

Is there a way of making sense of this? For all of us? Including those who do not believe "everything happens for a reason"?

It is clear that this outrageous loss and suffering has caused people to come together. To put away their differences and petty rivalries. Had the terrorists been successful it would have been in destroying our imperfectly delivered but majestically conceived attempt to be a single people…….. Out of many, one. I would hope we can all continue this spirit of concern, of tolerance, of togetherness and use it to renew our faith in country the world and ourselves. Remembering that the task of changing the world is done through the small, daily acts of kindness we do for each other. And by so doing we help each other to feel better- perhaps not today or next month or even next year, but let us begin.