Hate

Anyone can spread hate. It takes someone special to keep it from spreading. Lord, let that someone special be me.

I've just quoted myself from Facebook. It was one of those things which just came to me suddenly in the middle of the day. The lovely Miss Carol and I had been to South Dallas to visit the new baby and recover the dog. On the way down I was listening to the local talk show host in between traffic reports in regards to the "Ground Zero Mosque" in NYC.

From what I have heard, 3,000 red-blooded Christian Americans were herded into the World Trade Center where they were brutally murdered by ordinary followers of Islam who, as we all "know" are commanded by God to eliminate the infidels. Kinda stirs you up, doesn't it? Makes your blood boil. It reaches out to the inner xenophobic in all of us.

Grrrrrr!

The 3,000 weren't all Americans. They weren't all Christian. The killers weren't necessarily representative of Islam, either. To say that the fanatics who crashed airplanes into the WTC on 9/11 were representative of all of Islam is the same as saying that the rabble known as the Westboro Baptist Church are representatives of all of Christendom. To listen to the radio, though, one would think that this "Ground Zero Mosque" is deliberately being erected on top of the rubble of the WTC to so that the entire Islamic world will be able to thumb their nose at the United States.

So what is happening is that there is an attempt being made to manipulate the greater portion of us into thinking that adherents of Islam are less than human... that they should be kept in their place... that we should take actions to spread the hate. I'm being told that my friend from Lebannon who came in to my workplace on the afternoon of 9/11, my friend who was in just as much shock as I was concerning the day's events, is sub-human and deserves to die just because of his Islamic beliefs? If we're going after the Lebanese, then, let's spread out the hate a bit... let's hate Danny Thomas, Casey Kasem and Jamie Farr. They're all Lebanese...

Then there's the woman who came to visit while we were getting acquainted with Big Myrtle and the Walden Ponderer (one of my brothers-in-law). She was dressed in a full burkah (in Texas heat, no less) and had graciously cooked a meal for her friend's out of town guests. I'm supposed to hate her, too?

We're being told that we should hate illegal immigrants, these days. Historically, we have been told to hate just about any group of people who aren't like us. Blacks, Jews, Indians (both kinds), Irish, Poles, Italians, Germans, Japanese, Chinese... gee, I could go on for quite some time and still not be finished with the list (ah, the Finnish... let's find a reason to hate them, shall we?).

For some reason, the virulent attack has become the order of the day. We are told to hate people for their politics, the color of their skin, their haircuts or their body piercings. If you don't hate the same way that I want you to hate, then to hell with you, I'll find someone else to pal around with. On 9/11 I had the audacity to offer a prayer 'For our Enemies' (BCP page 816) at a hastily arranged church service. It was met with stoney silence. It's much easier to hate, you see.

Indeed, we have become a nation which seemingly prides itself with its ability to hate just about everyone for just about any reason we can think of. Odd, that, because if we are at the same time a Christian nation, shouldn't we follow the teachings of Jesus who admonished us to "...love your neighbor as yourself"?

While we're at it, my understanding is that it is a Community center, not a Mosque, it's adjacent to but not on "Ground Zero", and there's already Islamic worship space in the Pentagon, at just about the point where it, too was hit on 9/11.

Be Seeing You!


(BCP=Book of Common Prayer - Episcopalian, you see.)