Crucial Issues for America

By Alice Bernstein
September 2001

I live less than a mile from the former World Trade Center in which 50,000 people worked. On September 11, shortly after the horrific terrorist attacks, I was standing with neighbors at Thompson and Spring Streets where we 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 eight 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 has been so frequent; but it is the ugliest, most dangerous choice in the world.

This choice, Ms. Reiss explains is contempt, which Eli Siegel, poet, educator and founder of Aesthetic Realism defined as "the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it." Contempt, I myself learned from Aesthetic Realism, is as common as a woman's sarcasm with her husband, or a child sticking his tongue out at another. It is the cause of every injustice humanity has ever committed Ñ racism, crime, terrorism -- and 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....No 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."

And Ms. Reiss quotes from a 1952 lecture by Mr. Siegel about Discontent, in which he said that Americans "will have to say, for their own protection: "We've got to have people contented in this world or there will be danger going anywhere, danger going outside.' The worst form of discontent arises in people who, let us say,...attack people because...they are showing their anger."

3) The persons who attacked this nation...were monumentally vicious. But we need to ask: Is there a discontent, an anger at the United States, which others, who are not necessarily vicious, have? And did the anger at the U.S. which millions of people throughout the world have, enable those attackers to thrive, to be not adequately opposed?

4) The fact that we who may live in Manhattan or Washington or Kansas have selves which depend on the outside world, has come to be terrifically immediate. For example, the 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.

5) Wanting a person to be seen justly is good will. Good will is...the only right thing to have but it happens to be also that which we cannot afford not to have. It is the only self-preservation. Mr. Siegel continued in his lecture on Discontent: "My theme is(:) the discontent of so many people is dangerous to you....I think the American people...in an effort to save themselves in the most literal way, will say, "Unless we can have contented, not sour people, we, that is, ourselves and our families, will be in danger.'...One of these days people are going to say: 'My own discontent isn't the only thing that matters: Other people's discontent matters.'"

6) (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's 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.

7) 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. Some consequences of our encouraging them are now afflicting humanity.

The Koran, like the Bible, is very kind; but both can be used in an ugly way. And the people of the United States have to ask, What...should be the basis of the choices our nation makes: profits for corporations, or justice for human beings?

8) 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."

Alice Bernstein is an Aesthetic Realism Associate and writer whose articles on Aesthetic Realism as the knowledge that explains the cause and answer to racism, what is really happening in the economy, and the deepest questions about love and the family, appear in newspapers across the country, including her regular column "Alice Bernstein and Friends" in La Vida News/The Black Voice of Ft. Worth and Arlington, Texas. She is married to photographer David Bernstein, and together they study in classes taught by Ellen Reiss,Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism.For more information, contact the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene St., NYC 10012, 212-777-4490; www.AestheticRealism.org