The following is the text
The following is the text of a letter I have sent to Joe Grizzanti, the owner of the Warwick Valley Winery:
Dear Mr. Grizzanti,
After spending some time picking apples this past Saturday, my girlfriend and I headed up to Warwick Valley Winery, intent on stocking up on hard cider and Chardonnay.
I asked a woman working in the Winery shop, who I was later told is named Harriet, if the apple brandy was in stock. Alas, it was too early in the season for such things. We had met Harriet before, when we visited the Winery in the February off-season. My girlfriend and I continued making casual conversation, during which we mentioned that we had recently moved to the area from New York City, prompted in large part by the events of last September.
Apropos of nothing, Harriet offered the following: “They [terrorists] do bad things, we do bad things;” that I “had to admit” that the September 11 massacre was a “brilliant maneuver;” that America had been “asking for it for a long time;” and that one “has to be dispassionate” when considering the attack.
I was less then three blocks away when the first tower fell. Stunned, I told her that I found it difficult to be dispassionate about the attack, because I was there. Undaunted, Harriet repeated her belief that a dispassionate response was the appropriate response. The conversation ended shortly after that. Despite my initial inclination to leave immediately, we picked up a few bottles of cider and Chardonnay, then headed home.
There are a host of arguments to be made against drawing moral equivalency between America and the Islamic terrorists, against the ‘appreciation’ of acts of mass murder and destruction, and against the appropriateness of such acts as a response to American foreign policy, misguided and cruel though that policy sometimes is. None of these arguments serve the purpose of this letter, which is simply to tell you the following: I found Harriet’s comments deeply offensive, all the more so because she tossed them into a casual conversation. That leads me to believe that her opinions were likewise casual and ill-considered. To voice such opinions to a customer was entirely inappropriate. Given the winery’s proximity to the city, sooner or later she will say something similar to someone who has lost a friend, parent, or loved one. I doubt that their response to such cold-blooded dismissal of their loss will be “dispassionate.”
The Warwick Valley Winery’s employees are, of course, free to indulge in moral idiocy if they so choose. This is America, after all, which means that I am also free to deny the winery any of my future business. This is regrettable, because the 2001 Chardonnay is especially fine, and the hard cider is a true find. But I’m willing to make that admittedly small sacrifice to insure that I will not be giving any financial support whatsoever to someone who believes that the murder of 3,000 Americans is “brilliant.”
Sincerely,
Ian Wood
