I'm sitting on the ninth anniversary of the saddest day in our Nation's history, alternating between tears and swells of pride. I'm conflicted....so conflicted. I remember vividly nine years ago this morning, sitting at work and having my phone ring...."Turn on the news...quick"...and a day of labor ending in the face of two plumes of black smoke. I remember the feelings I had. How they alternated between heart wrenching sadness, and brute anger.
In the days, weeks and months that followed, I remember being so deeply proud to be an American. My goodness did we join together. I watched a President lead, and a nation follow. I remember learning about this group I had only heard glimmers of before...Al Quaeda. And a monster...Osama bin Laden, who actually believed that murdering innocent civilians was a Godly act. And I remember then rejecting that notion, out of hand, because no God would sanction that barbarism. I watched the Muslim faith be used to justify hatred and murder, and I watched a President warn us not to be taken in by this rhetoric. "Islam is a peace loving religion." said President George W. Bush.
But I also remember realizing that those people who had marched against us in the streets of so many foreign cities so many times before were taking on a special meaning for me and my fellow countrymen. No longer could we look at them as disrespectful nuisances who were exercising a right we afforded the least of our national brethren...the right of free speech...given precedence in the First Amendment to our beloved Constitution. Now, and forever, I would see them as potential threats to the well being of our nation and to law abiding and innocent civilians whose only crime was to go to work...
But I do not remember ever thinking anything but that the politics of hatred were to blame. Nor do I ever remember thinking that any religion, whether I believed in it or not, was based on hatred. Did I want Osama bin Laden dead? You can bet the deed to the ranch on that and never worry about homelessness! And I still do. Not because I think Christianity requires, nor justifies it. I want him dead because humanity justifies it. An act that heinous can have only one human response.
Yet I have sat here, in the last week leading up to 9/11/2010...the ninth anniversary of that tragic day and cannot help but think that we have come close to losing some thing much more important than even 3000 lives. I have watched us being lead to the brink of losing our national moral and ethical rudder. I watched an alleged "man of the cloth" from a Christian church in Florida openly call for a national "Burn the Koran Day" on the anniversary of 9/11.
First off, let me say, that I recall no historical event that intervenes between Adolf Hitler burning books in Berlin.and this planned event. And that parallel sickens me....
You see, to me, books symbolize the purpose of our First Amendment. They are the concretization of thought that that Amendment was designed to protect. In my mind, burning books is the ultimate symbol of the theft of freedom of thought and expression. And that, my friends, is the epitome of all "un-American'.
Now, why did the Rev. Terry Jones want to do this? As events unfolded, he decided that it was his statement that would persuade Muslims not to build a Mosque a few blocks from "Ground Zero". Why do we even care? The darned thing has been there for a couple years in a lousy building. Let em spruce the place up. I suspect you won't find me there for evening prayers, but you certainly won't find me opposing anyone who feels the requirement to do so.
You see, in that First Amendment is also the guarantee that we, each, have a right to exercise our own religious beliefs. I will continue to be a Christian...you can pretty much bank on that. But I feel fully confident that I can be a practicing Christian without precluding someone else from exercising the Muslim faith, or any other faith for that matter.
But I'm saddened...that the United States I so love...and the one that joined in the days and weeks after 9/11 together as one nation...and who was joined by so many foreign countries in our national grief...has been so disrespected by an act like this.
Reverend Jones..I am here to tell you that you have a right to hate Islam under my beloved Constitution. And you have a right to burn a Koran, if you own it. But I have the right to tell you a few things.
And I'm gonna!! You are a despicable excuse for a "holy man". You would make the Jesus I know weep, just like you made me weep. You are no better than Osama bin Laden himself, because you operate under the same theories and the same ethics he did when he put 9/11 into operation. It is the ethos of human hatred.
And let me remind you of what Heinrich Heine wrote, so presciently, and whose book was burned in Berlin: “Where books are burned in the end people will burn.”
