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WHAT DO WE TELL OUR CHILDREN ABOUT SEPTEMBER 11?


Oct 11, 2001


MARINA DEL REY, CA--It is very difficult for children to comprehend the existence of such evil as the terrorist attacks on America. Even harder for them to understand is why we were attacked, and what we should now do about it. What should you tell your children?

Dr. Dianne Durante's advice as a mother is laid out in a 9-page Q&A available at: http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/actofwar.html. Her answers are addressed to teenagers and she suggests that parents may need to condense or simplify them for younger children.

Among the kinds of questions she addresses:

1. Why do they hate us? The terrorists hate us because our Constitution and Bill of Rights guarantees our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and these rights conflict with the terrorists' religious and political beliefs. For example, America is a secular state, which means our government must remain legally separated from all religions--as it has been for over 200 years. Many of the terrorists are religious fanatics who can't accept this idea and want to kill anybody who disagrees with them. Our ideals and our whole history represent a complete disagreement with their views.

2. Does bombing them make us as bad as them? This may seem like a hard question, but the answer is obvious if you consider a similar situation. When a policeman shoots a murderer, who is trying to kill another person, does that make the policeman bad? No, it makes him good. Terrorists have murdered Americans time after time in the past decades. Thousands have died. The terrorists have promised to kill again and again. The governments who shelter these terrorists have refused again and again to stop them. In bombing them, we are acting in self-defense, to save ourselves from being killed. This is not bloodlust or evil. We are acting so that the killers will not be able to attack us again.

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Ayn Rand Institute executive director Dr. Yaron Brook is available for interviews.

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