A memorial as impetus to change

To the Editor of THE EAGLE: On Sunday, Sept. 11, the public was invited to attend a memorial gathering for the Twin Towers tragedy at the North Star Rare Books Store in Great Barrington. My husband and I went. It was everything a memorial gathering should, and can, be.

Dr. Brian Burke wrote and spoke, Rob Putnam sang the right songs of feeling and food-for-thought, and the owner of the bookstore, Randy Weinstein , gave us a W.E.B. Du Bois poem to read, and provided us all with this possibility of meeting. It occurred on a Sunday, and I thought how this is what the word “church” should really mean — an opening where people meet each other from their hearts. We don’t really need a church or synagogue or whatever building — we carry one in ourselves at all times, our hearts.

We were there with the memories of the Twin Towers, the airplanes and the Pentagon, and with the fresh thoughts and feelings of the recent Katrina event that has disrupted or ruined the lives of so many thousands of people and animals.

Randy Weinstein plans to open a Du Bois center in connection with his bookstore. Maybe some of us in this area could help him to do this, and it would be a gesture toward healing grave mistakes of many ancestors. We have to begin change somewhere. Katrina has shown us there really hasn’t been much change. What shall we do together to move stuck places?