VALERIE SCHULTZ: Denying religious freedom desecrates our 9/11 dead
| Wednesday, Sep 08 2010 05:20 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Sep 08 2010 10:08 PM
I think of them sometimes: the normal people, working in offices and traveling on planes, on Sept. 11, 2001. Innocent, poignant only in retrospect, they went about their daily lives: booting up their computers, pouring coffee, washing windows, answering a fire call, flying to Disneyland, flying home.
I wonder about their lives leading up to the moment of death: whether they had fought with their spouses or made love that morning; whether they said "I love you" when they dropped the kids at school or just told them not to forget to turn in that permission slip.
I picture the things left behind: checkbooks unbalanced, dry cleaning not picked up, rented DVDs unreturned, bananas on the counter to ripen or bread for that night's dinner to thaw, plans unfulfilled. My heart aches for the families waiting, the spouses and parents who did not hear, the children who did not get picked up, who did not have dinner and a bath and homework like regular nights. Sept. 11, which has become, alternately, a political tool, a justification for aggression, or a convenient cliche, is most of all a tragedy of regular folks.
The people killed on 9/11 were not on a quest for heroism. They were not at war. They had nothing to prove, no bone to pick. Perhaps they were not politically active or even aware. They were victims of terrorism simply because they were Americans. As such, their deaths have come to represent martyrdom on a grand scale, an unwitting sacrifice for country.
We surviving Americans were united on that day, in sorrow and in shock. Gripped by a shared national compassion, we had no differences. Nine years later, however, we are more likely to want to rip each other's throats out, call each other mean-spirited names, and in the process trample on the very things we honored together less than a decade ago. Where we lately stood as Americans, proud of the idealistic freedom we represented to the world, we now take it all back. We squabble and lash out in fear. We do not honor our dead when we renege on the deepest good of what it means to be American. And we should be ashamed of those who are perverting the founding principles of America to suit their political goals.
Yes: the mosque.
And not just that mosque. The Islamic community center proposed for the old Burlington Coat Factory in New York City, two blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood, is certainly at the center of the current controversy. (It might be noted that also located in that hallowed area of Lower Manhattan are strip clubs, bars, pizza joints, and fast food franchises. As my uncle from Jersey would say, It's Noo Yawk: whadda you care?) But mosques all around the country, and the believers who worship in them, are being persecuted and drummed out of communities by citizens who see no irony in trashing the concept of religious freedom in support of America, the land of religious freedom. Is it possible to profess love for America while opposing what America stands for? If you've got a sleek enough PR machine purring along, fueled by fear and ignorance, then yes, it is.
If we're going to invoke the ghosts of the 9/11 martyrs to curtail key provisions of the Constitution, then we'd best be conscious of who they were before they died. I can't imagine that any people breathing American air just before the terrorists struck them down would want their names after their deaths to be used to justify squelching the principle and practice of religious freedom. It is awfully close to a no-brainer to conclude that those ordinary Americans would not rest easily to see their deaths become fuel to stoke the un-American bonfire of anti-Islamic, frankly fascistic behavior.
As for the argument that a mosque, a religious house of worship, accurately represents the sociopathic behavior of a group of terrorists, I would counter that I don't recall any Americans demanding that Catholic churches be removed from Oklahoma City when Timothy McVeigh, a homegrown terrorist who was brought up Catholic, blew up 168 innocent people. That's because such a call would have been wildly inappropriate, almost comically misguided, and wrong. Every religion has its psychopaths. They do not define the religion.
America was founded in part by groups of spiritual people who yearned to worship God in peace, in the particular way they felt called to and saw fit. They were often outcasts, fleeing the oppression and prejudice of the old country, seeking solace on promising shores. Shame of those who would close those shores or apply different, unequal rules to the practice of Islam or any other religion.
The Americans who died on 9/11, and the Americans who want to build houses of worship on welcoming soil, are at heart the same people. It's the Americans clamoring to roll back the First Amendment and dictate how others serve God who desecrate our dead, and who may engineer the true lasting destruction of the dream of America.
These are the opinions of Valerie Schultz and not necessarily The Californian's.
