WHEN terrorists set out on that fateful Tuesday to destroy the symbolic totems of American prosperity and might, they also shattered the livelihood and dreams of thousands of people from scores of countries around the world. In the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, where hundreds of persons who, like others before them, had left their native lands to work, earn, develop themselves, and then help spouses, sons, daughters, parents, aunts and uncles to improve the quality of their lives in their homelands or in one of the many cities of the United States.

As one writer noted last week, some of the persons feared dead in the tragedies may have even been sympathetic to the plight and perceived injustices suffered by the terrorists. Yet they were destroyed in what are, undoubtedly, the most horrendous acts witnessed in the history of terrorism.

New York, it is said, is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and for those who thrive on the infinite variety of human interaction, the city that never sleeps is a Mecca of myriad ethnic cultures, languages, food and music. One could sample Thai food in a Manhattan restaurant, listen to Gypsy music on the pavement, buy an armful of Matryoshka dolls from the Russian women who vend them in Brighton Beach, get an earful of songs performed in four-point harmony by the Afro-American youths in the underground, sit next to a Palestinian wearing his keffiyeh, choose rice and peas or jerk-pork and festival from a Jamaican diner on Nostrand, or cross the street and select curry and roti or a plate of cook-up from a Guyanese establishment.

The Korean `Mom and Pop’ shops, which offer salted fish, pig-tails and smoked herring and other items, remind Guyanese of home. Italian diners display a spectrum of pasta dishes, Greek shops feature mouth-watering shish kebabs in their glass windows and young women from North Africa demonstrate their dexterity in transforming a head of `big’ hair into designer braids for a fee. Indeed, New York is a composite of cultures, a vibrant metropolis that pulses with the blood of people from almost every country of this planet.

It is indeed regrettable that a group or groups of persons, in their effort to strike out savagely at American dominance or to exact vengeance for what they deem to be an American policy of injustices, would kill and cripple so many innocent civilians and destroy billions of dollars worth of property.

The last century was drenched in the blood of two world wars, the Stalinist purges, the Jewish holocaust in Germany, the war on the Korean peninsula, the Vietnamese war, the liberation wars of Southern Africa, the conflict in Northern Ireland, the killings in Bosnia, the genocides in Rwanda and Burundi and flashpoint conflicts in the Middle East, Chechnya and Macedonia. Pope John Paul on a visit to the United States in 1995, articulated the hopes of all peace-loving people when he exhorted the world to prepare for a “new springtime of the human spirit” in the dawning of the third millennium. The tears over the hurts and injustices of the 20th century, the Pope argued, would have prepared the ground for this new springtime. We would then have “a civilisation worthy of the human person and a true culture of freedom”.

If the events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 constitute a portent of what the world could expect in this new millennium, then mankind has learnt nothing from the blood spilt so copiously in the 20th century and our civilisation has not bred in this generation respect for human life, tolerance of other people’s beliefs and cultures, or the faculty for resolving differences and conflicts through the process of discussion instead of utilising violence.