As I am preparing for the impending "event" this weekend, I am struggling to conceive a name for the coming commotion - remembrance, observation, dedication, anniversary, celebration, admonition, protest, demonstration, denigration, degradation, vilification, attack........
Ten years ago, thousands of people died during a small window of time for absolutely no credible reason at all. Ten years later, thousands of new people use the senselessness of those deaths to reify their own biases, ill-constructed truths, and ugliness - a horrible epitaph betraying the grossest of all manipulations. They take the twisted malice of a few individuals, soak it in the thoughtless sentiment of an undifferentiated tragedy, patch it together with their emptiness and angst, then spit it back at us as some sort of cockeyed cogent appeal to our empathy and patriotism. And despite our unease at the malignant ripple drifting through the rhetoric betrayed by the slight sneer, the spectre of 3,000 murdered souls raised so maliciously mutes our decency and the authors of this profanity walk away thinking they have created consensus.
It occurs to me that I am perhaps going about this business backwards - maybe I should invite these people over for a fight now. Might as well ostensibly spill blood over surrealistically silent television images a decade old than anything else I guess. So they can come over, and I will fight for my failures as a father, and they can fight for the women they have beaten, the people they cheated, the raise they didn't get, whatever - we can mix blood as Muslims and Christians, playing at a holy war that will relieve none of us from our true pain. Now is as a good time as ever, for I do not want to wait until I pull in front of them in traffic, upset them on a golf course, bump into them coming out of a restaurant, etc.
Who "owns" 9/11? Do I as an American? Do I not as a Muslim-American? Do you need to hate to own it? Is there a mortgage other than being born on this soil? Can I own 9/11 and not Oklahoma City? If I own either or both, what do I do with them? Who owns the 9/11 site? Who owns the right to determine the zoning rights around it? As a Muslim recently asked, "How many strip clubs, adult book shops, and liquor stores have to be between the site and the first mosque erected?" When we invoke the tragedy of this terrible event, we do so for what purpose? Perhaps the next time we hear something started with "9/11", we should look at the instigator and wonder if we would care to listen to him/her about any other subject at all.
I am not advocating that we ignore or forget that terrible day. I am simply asking what we should do with it now, and if we should consider taking it out of the hands of the villains who grabbed it up seconds after nineteen evil men put those buildings down. No one died that day in order that the rest us could hate a billion of our brothers and sisters around the word, a few hundred even laying broken and destroyed in the same rubble. Their souls should not be preserved in hatred. My Muslim heart hurts as much for those victims and their families as any other - more so than the cowardly heart hiding behind a microphone and a war cry. If your heart revisits that day, and pulses for vengeance and retribution against a sea of faceless humans, I will pray for you, I will pray for the of us.
I can remember a time in this country when we held our hearts while we sang our National Anthem then recited our Pledge of Allegiance proudly. Then, in times of darkness with heavy hearts, we would observe a moment of silence with solemnity and grace. Sometimes thousands of us standing together, not one wanting to distinguish himself in his vanity of grief. Silence. Maybe the only thing I can conclude about 9/11 these days is that 9 out of 11 of us probably shouldn't talk at all. Silence. Silence
Ten years ago, thousands of people died during a small window of time for absolutely no credible reason at all. Ten years later, thousands of new people use the senselessness of those deaths to reify their own biases, ill-constructed truths, and ugliness - a horrible epitaph betraying the grossest of all manipulations. They take the twisted malice of a few individuals, soak it in the thoughtless sentiment of an undifferentiated tragedy, patch it together with their emptiness and angst, then spit it back at us as some sort of cockeyed cogent appeal to our empathy and patriotism. And despite our unease at the malignant ripple drifting through the rhetoric betrayed by the slight sneer, the spectre of 3,000 murdered souls raised so maliciously mutes our decency and the authors of this profanity walk away thinking they have created consensus.
It occurs to me that I am perhaps going about this business backwards - maybe I should invite these people over for a fight now. Might as well ostensibly spill blood over surrealistically silent television images a decade old than anything else I guess. So they can come over, and I will fight for my failures as a father, and they can fight for the women they have beaten, the people they cheated, the raise they didn't get, whatever - we can mix blood as Muslims and Christians, playing at a holy war that will relieve none of us from our true pain. Now is as a good time as ever, for I do not want to wait until I pull in front of them in traffic, upset them on a golf course, bump into them coming out of a restaurant, etc.
Who "owns" 9/11? Do I as an American? Do I not as a Muslim-American? Do you need to hate to own it? Is there a mortgage other than being born on this soil? Can I own 9/11 and not Oklahoma City? If I own either or both, what do I do with them? Who owns the 9/11 site? Who owns the right to determine the zoning rights around it? As a Muslim recently asked, "How many strip clubs, adult book shops, and liquor stores have to be between the site and the first mosque erected?" When we invoke the tragedy of this terrible event, we do so for what purpose? Perhaps the next time we hear something started with "9/11", we should look at the instigator and wonder if we would care to listen to him/her about any other subject at all.
I am not advocating that we ignore or forget that terrible day. I am simply asking what we should do with it now, and if we should consider taking it out of the hands of the villains who grabbed it up seconds after nineteen evil men put those buildings down. No one died that day in order that the rest us could hate a billion of our brothers and sisters around the word, a few hundred even laying broken and destroyed in the same rubble. Their souls should not be preserved in hatred. My Muslim heart hurts as much for those victims and their families as any other - more so than the cowardly heart hiding behind a microphone and a war cry. If your heart revisits that day, and pulses for vengeance and retribution against a sea of faceless humans, I will pray for you, I will pray for the of us.
I can remember a time in this country when we held our hearts while we sang our National Anthem then recited our Pledge of Allegiance proudly. Then, in times of darkness with heavy hearts, we would observe a moment of silence with solemnity and grace. Sometimes thousands of us standing together, not one wanting to distinguish himself in his vanity of grief. Silence. Maybe the only thing I can conclude about 9/11 these days is that 9 out of 11 of us probably shouldn't talk at all. Silence. Silence
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