“Journey to a Hate Free Millennium,” a forum sponsored by the Community Advocates program and the 9-11 Open Response Committee, pushed participants to not only think with their minds, but also with their hearts.

“I want you to think from two places. You are experts at thinking from the brain, but take that elevator and think with your hearts too,” said program creator Brent Scarpo.

The events of September 11 cast a long shadow over the forum. Roughly half the participants knew someone who had lost someone in the terror attacks.

“We do not need to recreate 9-11. We need to create a solution so that this never happens again,” said Scarpo. To that end Scarpo stressed that the question “why do they hate us,” as put by an October 23 Newsweek cover, must be addressed.

In answering that question the program demonstrated it is not linked to tanks, policy, politics, or religion. It is linked to hate.

Five students from the audience were randomly given one of five place cards with “ignorance, fear, anger, hate, and suffering,” written on them and asked define what the card meant to them personally.

Tim Lee ‘06, who held the “anger” card, revealed that only three days before the tragedy his mother was scheduled on one of the flights that crashed into the Twin Towers.

Although confused in the immediate aftermath of the attacks Lee said “I became angry,” once the connection was made.

The five students aided the organizers, in that they displayed the chain of feelings through stories, allowing the rest of the audience to see that ignorance produces fear, which leads to anger, which causes hate and produces suffering. Scarpo pushed the participants to look inward to discover how to fight terror, a by-product of hate.

“To deal with global terrorism we must deal with terrorism at home. We must look at how we terrorize each other. And then when we stop terrorizing each other because of our differences, we can then address terror on a global scale,” said Scarpo.

Scarpo urged the participants to venture outside of personal comfort zones—to share their personal truths even though it involves the risk of rejection.

Scarpo showed a documentary, Journey to a Hate Free Millenium: Stories of Compassion which focused on the effects of hate in the cases of the James Bryd, Matthew Shepard, and the victims of Columbine.

“Everyday we have the choice to be open and inclusive or hateful and intolerant. We need to talk about the words to end hate. Hate begins with a simple word. We as a nation—we are facing many fears associated with hate.”

At the end of the forum, Scarpo offered the audience thimbles and ended the forum with the words of his mother.