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.

Oops! Our bad!

Oops. Our bad! No hard feelings black people! That’s the message that the U.S. Senate sent out today, apologizing for wrongs done to blacks through slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws. This isn’t the first time our Senate has apologized either. They’ve issued mea culpa to people of Japanese descent who were interred during World War II, to Hawaiians for overthrowing their kingdom so that we could have a nice vacation spot and to Native Americans for the whole stealing and raping of the land and killing them off with smallpox thing.

And that’s nice. I remember when I was four years old and my mom taught me that you should try to never hurt people, but if you do, that you should always say you’re sorry. Then I got to have ice cream.

So, I can’t help but wonder why it takes Congress almost 150 years to do something that I mastered at the age of four. Do they not serve ice cream in the Senate cafeteria? Did all of our Senators grow up without mothers?

What troubles me most is why now? I mean no disrespect but everyone who was once a slave is now dead, the apology, in addition to being long overdue, is falling on ears that are listening from heaven, so I can’t help but wonder why our elected officials are finally apologizing to dead people when those of us who are still alive are in such desperate times.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that dead people vote more religiously than the living do?

I can’t help but wonder if in 150 years, our Congress will get together and formally apologize to the descendants of slaves who were alive in 2009 and didn’t have health care, who were unemployed, whose mortgages were in foreclosure because instead of actually doing something about the problems of the day, in a dire and serious time, they chose to pander and prance on camera, posing for pictures, slapping each other on the back for doing something a child could and would have done in less than five minutes back when the people we were apologizing to were still around?

I wonder if they’ll apologize to the rest of us who face the same circumstances? I wonder if they’ll admit that their predecessors, so completely incompetent that they wanted no part in solving the issues of the day, chose instead to make news splashes with issues that were important, but in no way time sensitive?

I wonder how alone President Obama must feel? I wonder if he shakes his head and questions exactly how he’s supposed to affect change in a country that desperately needs it when an entire third of the government is actively working on apologizing for things that happened 150 years ago. Even as a black man, I wonder if our President is just rolling his eyes and asking God, how can he possibly be surrounded by so much ineptitude? What a lonely feeling it must be to try to solve a financial crisis, out of control unemployment, financial institution collapse, a couple of wars, lack of a coherent and effective healthcare, energy crisis and every other problem of the day when the 535 members of the legislative branch of the government are high fiving, smiling and posing for pictures with whatever black people they can find?

Perhaps we should take note. Perhaps, when our Senators and Congressmen are next elected, we should ask them what they were doing with their time when we were hurting? Were they actively seeking solutions to current issues that faced our nation, or were they posturing, taking care of business that children could have accomplished in much less time?
Perhaps the Change We Need involves more than the election of just one man. Perhaps we’ll have to clean the whole damn house and save our ancestors from the idiocy of a too late apology that can only sooth a sting that won’t ever fully heal.