Letter to Time

I resonated with the aspect of missed opportunity in Kurt Andersen's back cover story, "Terror Has A Half-Life" in this week's commemorative 9/11 edition of Time magazine. So yesterday I wrote the editor the following letter:




Dear Time,

I appreciated Kurt Andersen's back cover story (Beyond 9/11 Issue). Having visited Ground Zero just a month ago, I came away with similar reflections. What if instead of entering two wars as a response to the 9/11 attacks, we had invested that $2-3 trillion on what makes America so resilient in the first place: its people. Not only could President Bush have made the urgent call to wean us from oil, but the opportunity was there to inspire all of us to invest more heavily in education, the arts, technology, and housing for the homeless - or to volunteer - all investments in citizens by citizens that would have made us stronger as a country. In the end, our top political officials governed by the very thing they wanted us to overcome: fear.

Sincerely,

Kevin Doi
Diamond Bar, CA

Postscript: My response ended up being published in the 9/26/2011 edition of Time (Rick Perry cover).