Not in our name.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: War on terrorism, Unitad States - Brief Article

Despite the TV networks' best efforts to funnel the grief and pain of September 11 into the flask of war, not everyone who lost a loved one cooperated with this effort.

Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez's son Greg was one of the victims of the World Trade Center attack. They wrote a letter to President Bush that said, "Your response to this attack does not make us feel better about our son's death. It makes us feel worse. It makes us feel that our government is using our son's memory as a justification to cause suffering for other sons and parents in other lands."

Judy Keane's husband, Richard, was also killed in the World Trade Center attack. According to The Washington Post, "she helped organize a prayer vigil near her home." More than 5,000 people attended, the paper reported. The assault "was in retaliation for something else, and that was the retaliation for something else," she told the Post. "Are we going to continue this in perpetuity? We have to say at some point, OK, let's find another way."

Robin Theurkauf lost her husband in the attack on the World Trade Center. She now has to raise their three boys by herself. "While this attack was intended to provoke, responding in kind will only escalate the violence," she wrote in The Friend, the Quaker weekly.

Abe Zelmanowitz was the man Bush praised for staying at the side of his quadriplegic friend when the World Trade Center was hit. Zelmanowitz's nephew Matthew Lasar said he does not want "bloody vengeance." He told the Institute for Public Accuracy, "What I see coming are actions and policies that will cost many more innocent lives, and breed more terrorism, not less. I do not feel my uncle's compassionate, heroic sacrifice will be honored."

Derrill Bodley and Deborah Borza lost their daughter Deora, twenty, who was on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. At a memorial service at Santa Clara University, where Deora was a student, her parents said she would have wanted them to forgive the hijackers, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Borza read from one of her daughter's journals: "People ask whom, what, when, where, how, why. I ask peace."

"We must not retaliate in kind as if our cause allows...