Mosque Near Ground Zero

Everyone has their underwear in a bunch over the proposed plan to build a mosque only 600 feet from ground zero in New York where the World Trade Center once stood. Some are protesting the plan, saying that it would be a disgrace to those who died on 9/11 to have a mosque built so close to where they died. Some are fighting the protesters saying that our country was actually founded on some arcane principle known as the freedom of religion.

For my part, I don’t really care where any mosques are built. Maybe I’m a fool, but I don’t think all Islamic people are terrorists. Oh, and I don’t think that those who are would ever set up shop in a huge building that used to house a Burlington Coat Factory only 600 feet from their last big target. I tend to think the bad guys will probably try to stay on the down low. At very worst, if they do try to hide in plain sight, then maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I have to imagine that even our inept intelligence community can keep track of the terrorists if they all congregate in a well-known place.

I’ll leave the arguing to those more passionate than I though. The more I hear about the situation though, the more I’m drawn to our country’s past and I can’t help but be a little proud of how far we’ve come. It may not seem like a natural time for pride, but compared to our history, those of Middle-eastern decent are getting a pretty good shake. Don’t be naïve, this isn’t an easy time for people who have immigrated to this country from that region, but ask any Japanese American who was alive during World War II if they’d rather get dirty looks at the airport and have protests over where they worship, or if they’d rather get locked up in internment camps and I’m guessing they’ll say the former.

We have a history of hatred and a track record for treating those we hate pretty poorly. The Japanese and some Germans were imprisoned when we hated them. So were the Africans who arguably got the worst of our hate. Of course the Native Americans might argue that point. When the Irish first came to our shores during the Potato Famine we gave them a case to make and the Chinese who came to build our railroads were little more than slaves themselves.

We’re flat out mean to the people du jour who we hate. We always have been. It’s in our blood. We’re good at it. We look at them as less than human because it helps us rationalize them. We call them savages, niggers, micks, the yellow peril, Japs and slant-eyes. We have believed them to be less than human and then we proceed to treat them as such. We’ve put them in chains, given them blankets infected with small pox, we’ve locked them in prisons and placed them in ghettos.

That could have happened after 9/11. In fact, if 9/11 had happened earlier in our history it certainly would have. We’d have locked the “ay-rabs” up in camps. We’d have torn down all of their mosques. But that’s not who we are anymore, at least not all of us. We can’t expect the world to change at the drop of a hat or in the blink of an eye and we can’t cure centuries of ignorance overnight. I’m certainly not arguing that we’ve acted in a Christ-like manner in the way we’ve treated Middle-Easterners but I do think, we’ve treated them less in the way of the devil than our own ancestors would have.

It’s easy to pick sides in this current debate. It’s easy to be mad at one side or the other. It’s easy to be outraged by obvious insensitivity or appalled by the ignorance to our founding principles but when you take a step back and you look at it all from a distance, I think you can’t help but see how times have changed. Tempers are flaring, sides are standing opposed and the argument rages on, but arguments are better than chains, better than prisons, better than viewing a people as sub-human. Because while some would support those very thoughts in a heartbeat most of us would never stand for it.

It’s an interesting point in history. The unenlightened are still loud and garner a great deal of attention in their ignorance and hate, but somewhere along the way, we’ve moved past the days of old. We’ve chosen a new way. It’s far from perfect. We have a long way to go. Make no mistake though, we have come so very far from who we were at our worst.

I went into a convenience store today and there was a WWII veteran at the lottery counter sporting his Navy hat commemorating the ship he served on during the war. He was chatting with the man behind the counter, a man of Middle-eastern heritage. They spoke like they were old friends and maybe they are just that. They weren’t talking about mosques or wars or rights or freedoms. They were talking about their grandchildren. Perhaps the future for those grandchildren isn’t as dim as it looks. Maybe all it takes is a clearer perspective to see that even if we take one step back for every two steps forward, we’re still getting somewhere. Maybe the idea of America isn’t quite dead yet.

National Where Were You Day.

Happy “Where Were You Day!” That’s what this is, isn’t it? This is the day of the year when we nod our heads solemnly, when we frown, when we tell each other we can’t believe it’s been eight whole years—how it seems like only yesterday—and then we perform the custom of his new holiday: We trade stories about where we were when those terrorist planes flew into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and crashed in a Pennsylvanian field (if we remember that there were more than the planes that crashed into the WTC that is).

This is the Kennedy moment for my generation, and a new one to add to the collection of those who came before. This is the moment frozen in time and that is the topic of conversation today. The protocol is simple. You look sad, you express disbelief in the time that’s passed, you share your personal experience—where you were when you heard, who you know who knew someone who knew someone who died, or was a hero. Of course there are people who truly were personally affected eight years ago today, but they probably aren’t treating today like an opportunity to tell stories unless it’s for catharsis sake.

For the rest of us though, it’s how we mark the day. It assuages our instinct of needing to show some kind of solemnity. Bad things happened on this date in history. We survived it. So it’s incumbent upon us to be respectful of those who didn’t. Strange, that we decide to do so by marking our own moment in time.

Eight years later, I’m afraid it’s the only personal connection most of us have to the event. It’s been a long time since any of us have sent books and magazines to soldiers. It’s been a long time since we’ve flown our yellow ribbons in support of troops that still fight—regardless of whether or not you believe in the reasons they do. Gone are the feelings of unity and oneness that prevailed for ever-so brief a time. We are every bit as divided a nation as we were on September 10, 2001—if not more so.

Funny, how it doesn’t embarrass anyone. Funny, how so many promises made in vain and left unkept not remembered at all today. Funny, how when those things are brought up, we choose to blame leaders we elected—making hasty and easy scapegoats instead of taking any personal responsibility. Funny, how today has become about me-me-me. This is where I was when the world changed!

Someone’s mother was in a plane that crashed. Someone’s father was in the building it crashed into. Someone’s son was a fireman. Someone’s daughter was a cop. They rushed in, while others rushed out. When was the last time anyone donated to help the forgotten families? Not really the in-vogue charity anymore, is it? They still sing God Bless America before baseball games—I wonder if anyone thinks about the reason they started doing so?
I was in my car, on my way to work. I heard about it on the radio. I guess that’s important. I guess my role in it all means something. When you ask me, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you that I’ll never forget where I was, as long as I live.

I’d tell you what that day means to me too if you bothered to ask, but you won’t. No one does. Not anymore. It’s for the history books to sort out now. The ones we write today will paint a valiant picture of those of us who survived the day. Though, when others look back, when those who write the history are removed from it far enough to see it objectively, I wonder if they’ll ask: How did the day that changed everything, really change anything at all?

9/11

I get into arguments over this every year when I write about it, and I’ve been writing about it for four years now, but except for the most glaring, obvious and unavoidable ways, I think that we, as a country, have largely forgotten 9/11.

The predictable arguments arise that we are still in a war that was a result of that day, that we have to get to the airports earlier, that we feel the effect of the Patriot Act and those are certainly valid points if I was talking about the effects 9/11 has had on our government, but that’s not my point.

When I say that we have largely forgotten the events of 9/11, I’m very simply talking about the hearts and minds of the people. In the cycle of grief, a psychologist would call this phase Acceptance. I can’t help but wonder if we’ve reached that cathartic stage far too soon though?

Acceptance is the final stage in the grieving cycle, and as the name implies, it means moving on. I think that by and large, we’ve moved on. And while that would be a good thing if this grief cycle was personal, I can’t help but wonder if it’s right for us collectively?

The indelible images of those planes crashing into those towers, the images of those towers crumbling to the ground are still and will forever remain in our minds, but they are a bit fuzzier than they used to be. They have taken on a movie-like quality, now that they are removed from the gravity of knowing that thousands of people had just died. The images are still horrible, but the result of those images seems lost and the lack of context makes them somehow weaker.

In an interview this morning on the radio with Mark Suppelsa, a local news anchor, I learned that on days like today, there is always heated debate about whether or not to show the images of the planes colliding with the twin towers because any time those images are shown, the stations receive complaints.

The country who claimed, “We Will Never Forget,” seems to want to do just that. Don’t show us images that might make us sad. We can have our moment of silence, wear our flag pin and talk around the water cooler about where we were at that fateful moment, but don’t make us watch it again. Don’t make us see the terror on people’s faces. Don’t make us think about the gravity of it all. Let us keep it all in the periphery. Let us talk about it like they were the events in a movie or a book we’d read a long time ago. Let us be detached.

It seems that once we reached the healing step of acceptance, that we, as a country, found it easiest to move forward by reverting to another stage of grief, denial. Grief is a lifelong process. It really has no end and it’s not uncommon at different times for people to slip back into different stages in the cycle, but we’re not talking about the death of a single person here. We’re talking about the slaughter of thousands. We’re talking about an execution. We’re talking about an act of terrorism—a word, coincidentally, that has lost it’s punch as a keyword in every speech given by every politician made since that day seven years ago.

Our elected officials have done a great deal to stunt our grieving. We’ve become so disenfranchised with the individual politicians who have so closely associated themselves with a War On Terror that we forget that it is a war. We forget our united resolve to see the perpetrators of 9/11 brought to death or justice that was so prevalent in the days and months after the attack—during our Anger stage.

I’m not one to call for war, or killings or violence, but I can’t help but ask the question—should our feelings about our government and the way they have handled the aftermath really equate to a free pass for those who have attacked us? Should we not still be resolved in demanding justice? Shouldn’t we be actively defining what that justice should be instead of giving blanket disapproval for an unpopular war? We choose to blame a single man because it’s easy and convenient and allows us to be free of guilt. He has played his part, no doubt and his blame is beyond question, but he is ours, elected by us to do as we want and so his failures are our own.

His villainy is so prevalent that we want to disassociate everything he’s done from our collective conscience. We want to undo all he has done. As with all politics in a two party system, everything is polarized. Yes or no, black or white, with us or against us are the battle cries of those in the argument, but I ask, if we look back and instead of insisting on an absolute at one end of the spectrum or the other, if we had insisted on a refocusing on the task that we demanded be undertaken—instead of the task that we had deemed to be of ulterior motivation, if that may have been something that we all could have rallied around?

We are a nation of symbols today. We outwardly show that we have not forgotten, we show that we are all patriots, we show that we remember. How shallow our symbols have become though. Time and frustration and revision have dulled us to what happened that day seven years ago. We call to complain that the images are too graphic when we see them on television. We are so ardent in our disapproval of a man and his war that we demand it end and fail to see a larger picture. We vacillate between acceptance and denial and blur the lines that connect them.

Despite the symbols we wear and display today, we are a nation who sees the events of seven years ago with blurred edges that threaten to fade a bit more with every day. We use our symbols to fool ourselves into thinking that’s not true, but it is, and I can think of no higher disgrace to those who lost their lives that day, than that our pettiness has so thoroughly faded the absolute horror of that day.

We pledged that we would not forget and I suppose we haven’t when it comes down to it, but perhaps we should have pledged that we would never distort—because that, we assuredly have.