When my scared son put his head upon my chest after watching the terrible scene of hijacked planes flyingsintosthe World Trade Center, I was attacked immediately by a flurry of questions from my son. Some of them were so difficult to answer that I was tongue-tied several times which greatly irritated him. His questions didn't stop there. Every day he would ask me some unexpected questions. I knew I couldn't take them lightly any more and he wouldn't be satisfied with "Don't think about it?" when he listened to adult conversations and news on TV. So I had to set aside some time to filter the information and then communicate with him.

　　First I decided it was essential to give an exact definition of terrorism (the use or threat of violence to scare people or governmentssintoschanging their rules or decisions) by consulting the United Nations's documents. Then I collected the information about the targets of the attack: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and wrote them down on a piece of paper with their pictures attached. I also gathered information about the suspects and the country with a map of Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world with more than 42 percent population under the age of 15, 30 percent illiterates (I especially stressed the scarcity of food, hoping that he won't be a fussy eater any more, and it really worked once).

　　Although well equipped with those hard facts, I found myself cornered again by his more complicated quesitons: why do people do such terrible things? "It is hard to answer, my dear. Some things are beyond my understanding," I told him, "I can't explain some things I don't know and perhaps we will never know why they happened. The point is not the reason, my boy. The point is that this kind of action is a horrible evil, a cowardly act in which thousands of innocent people got killed and hurt.?I hope my explanation can expell his doubts.

　　But his next questions were more difficult: who are Muslims? Are they terrible? I thought about it for quite a while and then began with explanations of religions. I doubt I explained clearly. But his constant nodding of his head assured me and I went on to say the importance of respect, tolerance and understanding between different ethnic and religious groups. Only a small, hateful people did this. We can't direct the hatred to other people because the spreading of hatred will only bring about more disasters to us human beings. It is time and love that heal the wound. We should sympathize with the innocent people who lost their lives in the United Sates, the Afghans who lost their homes as a result of the American retaliation attack on Afghanistan and the people who were harassed in America because of the same ethnic background or religion with those who committed the terrible crime. Finally I am relieved that he can comprehend part of those complicated ideas.(中国农业大学外语系常慧灵)