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From notes@igc.apc.org Sun Aug 27 13:54:20 1995 Received: from cdp.igc.apc.org (192.82.108.1) by MediaFilter.org with SMTP (MailShare 1.0b10); Sun, 27 Aug 1995 13:54:21 -0500 Received: (from notes) by cdp.igc.apc.org (8.6.12/Revision: 1.204 ) id GAA00315 for "conf-zamir.chat"; Sun, 27 Aug 1995 06:45:59 -0700 Date: 27 Aug 1995 06:09:14 Reply-To: Conference "zamir.chat"From: 100440.270@compuserve.com Subject: A Time to Live To: Recipients of zamir-chat-l Message-ID: <950827130438_100440.270_BHG46-6@compuserve.com> X-Gateway: conf2mail@igc.apc.org Errors-To: owner-zamir-chat-l@igc.apc.org Precedence: bulk Lines: 67 From: Robert Bennett <100440.270@compuserve.com> Dear President Clinton: One of the surprising effects of these letters is the various kinds of people it has brought me into contact with, both over the Internet and in person. The following conversation is perhaps significant because it indicates, after four years of war in the Balkans, the perception many people now have of the Serbs. "You should be careful, you know," one of my former students said to me suddenly one evening. We were sitting in one of those bars you can find in any university quarter in a German city: stark, crowded, smoky, dimly lit. I asked her what in the world she meant. "The Serbs. They've tried everything they could think of to discourage those letters you keep writing to Clinton, and the copies you send out. Some of the flames you've been getting have been pretty savage." She took a sip of weissbier. "What I mean," she said, almost starting to stammer, "is that the Serbs might not stop with nasty computer messages. They might try to get you out of the way permanently." I stared at her for a moment, and as it dawned on me what she was talking about, I burst out laughing. When I saw the wounded expression on her face, though, I stopped cold. "Okay," I said quietly. "I'm sorry." Then I smiled and slipped into my best Victor Laszlo accent. "'If you kill people like me, Major Strasser,'" I tried to quote from "Casablanca," "'hundreds, even thousands will rise to take our place. Even Serbs can't kill that fast.'" Now it was her turn to smile, for a few seconds. "I'm serious," she said. "Any group that's capable of sending snipers to murder women on the streets of Sarajevo or shelling three girls last week in Gorazde, any group that can murder a thousand Moslem men and boys in a football stadium in Srebrenica, is certainly able to manage a fatal "accident" on the streets of any West European city, if they put their minds to it." Now I was serious too. "Look," I said. "After what they've done already, God only knows what the Serbs are capable of. Okay, let's say they actually can continue getting away with murder." I looked directly at her and spoke slowly and carefully. "When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, one of my professors said to a group of us one day, 'If a man has nothing he's willing to die for, then he has nothing to live for either.' I didn't understand what he meant at the time, but I do now. Whether death is imminent or not, that seems to a lot of us a reasonable way to think." She looked at me with an expression I'd never seen before, a mixture of sadness, exasperation, and kindness. "All right," she said, "maybe I'm just imagining it all." She hesitated. "And I know it sounds crazy," she blurted out, "but just don't stand too close to the edge of the platform when you're waiting for the subway." She examined the expression on my face. "And tell all your friends that, too." This time, she was so absolutely serious that I wouldn't have dreamed of laughing. Sincerely yours, Robert J. Bennett