And so it begins.
In Chicago, an
unknown person threw a firebomb at an Arab-American community center.
In Tennessee,
an anonymous caller directed two Arab-American clinic workers to “get out
of our country” and called them “foreign fags.”
In Texas, shooters
fired bullets into the Islamic Center of Irving.
Frank Roque of
Mesa, Ariz. allegedly started his Saturday by shooting Balbir Singh Sodhi,
a gas station attendant who may have looked Arabic, but was actually from
Punjab, India and practiced the Sikh religion. Roque went on to shoot at
a Lebanese-American gas station attendant, and missed. Then he fired at
an Afghani family’s home.
Closer to home,
a photographer of Palestinian descent (and a colleague of mine) was repeatedly
threatened while taking photographs for this ongoing story, and a man at
a gas station threatened to shoot him.
It goes on and
on. The list of threats, jeers from passing cars, verbal (and sometimes
physical) assaults is ricocheting around the Internet, and I’m sure there
are more.
On the side of
near-insanity, we have Jerry Falwell, saying, “The ACLU's got to take a
lot of blame for this. And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But,
throwing God or successfully with the help of the federal court system,
throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists
have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And
when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really
believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the
gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative
lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have
tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you
helped this happen.’”
It would almost
be funny if there weren’t still people who listen to him.
Everywhere I
go, I see “God Bless America.” The song has been on the radio for the first
time in my lifetime. Everyone from fast-food places to car dealerships
to public bodies is displaying the flag and a patriotic message.
It certainly
feels good. Standing together instead of shoving each other apart. If only
human beings were that noble.
Instead, many
of us are standing together, and pushing away those who want and need to
stand with us the most. Every Islamic and Arab-American group in the U.S.
and abroad (well, almost every group) has declared as loudly as they can
that Islam does not call for the deaths of innocents, that these fanatics
have twisted their faith.
We should be
familiar with this concept. After all, can we really say that Jerry Falwell
represents all of Christianity? If that is the case, I hereby resign as
an active Christian.
A friend of mine
stood in line for quite some time the other day, waiting to buy an American
flag. The only place in town that still had any in stock was a “Flags of
the World” shop. While standing in line, he felt like a patriot.
“Oh, the mom
and pop who sold me the flag, they were Arab-Americans,” he wrote to me
later. “It made no difference to the others, or to me, in that line.”
In the wake of
countless comparisons to Pearl Harbor, I don’t need to reiterate the warnings
of so many about the darker side of that tragedy. In our rush to nationalism,
we frequently see America as Caucasian, three-generation, McDonald’s-eating
suburban folk. After Pearl Harbor, it was all too easy to round up the
Japanese-Americans and stick them in internment camps. Our leaders may
be more enlightened today, but the masses still wave their flags and shout
“Go back home.”
How quickly we
forget.
We forget that,
as Roger Simon once said in an award-winning Independence Day column for
the Baltimore Sun, “We are a nation of losers.” I wish I could find a copy
of that column, because it was essential in my development as a (hopefully)
politically astute person. In it, Simon wrote that we were founded by religious
fanatics, criminals, irresponsible charlatans.... losers, in short, who
couldn’t make it in the established world and came to America to build
a new one.
And we did. Contrary,
irritatingly smug, stubborn beyond all reason... America, the nation of
losers that won. The Bad News Bears of the world.
But in the last
two centuries or so, we’ve forgotten who those losers were. They were English,
French, German, Italian, Pakistani, Indian (the real India), Chinese, Russian,
Japanese, African, Spanish, and so on. We brought our hatreds and conflicts
with us - does no one remember 19th-century Boston, with its “No Irish”
signs in shop windows? Still, we managed to build a melting pot, one that
occasionally boils over, but that also created the most diverse nation
in the history of the world, for better or for worse.
Once upon a time,
I knew a Pentecostal minister. He sat next to me in high school art class.
Yes, we were both only eighteen years old. He was adamantly opposed to
everything I believed in, and vice versa. I painted abstract swirls of
color because I wasn’t good enough to make anything look like anything,
and he drew racist, reactionary cartoons.
And we argued.
Forty-five minutes a day, every day for a semester. Religion, politics,
Jimmy Swaggart, race relations, the evils (or not) of alcohol, the place
of women in the church and in society, gay rights (or lack thereof), abortion...
Oops, there was one issue on which we agreed. Everything else was fair
game.
He had harsh
things to say about everyone who wasn’t white, straight and Protestant,
preferably Pentacostal. But then one day he came in rather subdued. I asked
him what was bugging him, since he’d let me get away with several statements
that ordinarily would have sparked the daily debate.
He said he had
discovered one of his more recent ancestors was a Native American - Cherokee,
to be precise.
It had changed
everything for him. Native Americans were among the races he had denounced,
and now he discovered he was descended from them. He had to reexamine all
his beliefs about race.
We are all descended
from the immigrants. Even if we are Native Americans, they emigrated here
once upon an ancient time. We are the children of losers, wanderers who
tamed a world, and we forget their heritage at our peril.
But that means
we must include those who have come to us in recent years. They live with
us, pay their taxes, send their children to school, serve in our armed
forces, and they wept alongside us when the Towers collapsed. They have
cast their lot with us, and we turn against them in hatred.
Losers or not,
they stand beside us, if only we will let them. |
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