"This isn't about what's right, it's about what's decent," said a woman protesting the proposed Islamic Center in NYC. I'm not sure when religious intolerance became decent, but I think it all started a few weeks ago when some conservative political players started this whole mess which is now, sadly, engulfing the nation. I heard a journalist recently call it a nontroversy, or a controversy that does not exist until created for political gain. These political players found this issue and took it national, supposedly, in the name of honoring the victims of and families who lost loved ones on 9/11. And now, a bunch of those said family members are up in arms, their grief reignited and lending support to a bunch of morally bankrupt politicians and/or pundits who only want to win votes in November.
I am angry about these beginnings to the nontroversy as much as I am about how comfortable America seems with being intolerant to Islam. These political pundits are using the grief of 9/11 victims for political gain. It's sickening, and it seems like the families aren't aware that they, and their justified grief, are just pawns in a political game.
Still, I want to understand why many families connected to 9/11 are in opposition, so I did some reading. On the "Park 51" page at Wikipedia, C. Lee Hanson, whose son, daughter-in-law, and baby granddaughter were killed, said that he felt that building a tribute to Islam so close to the World Trade Center site would be insensitive: "The pain never goes away. When I look over there and I see a mosque, it's going to hurt." On a gut level, I can understand this. Almost every time I see a dad playing lovingly with his kids, grief that I never had that experience bubbles up as longing and sadness for a few moments. People who have lost loved ones (or never had the ones they should have had) get triggered by all sorts of things: perfume from a passerby, a song on the radio, visiting a restaurant the loved one liked to eat at, passing a car like they used to drive.
And in the less evolved part of our brain, the one that responds to pain in a flight or fight kind of way, I can see how a family member of someone killed on 9/11 may have come to associate Islam with the death of their loved one. In grief, all sorts of conclusions get drawn that may make the pain, though seemingly endless, at least bearable. Knowing who the killers were allowed anger to have a target. There is that person, or those people, that killed my son, my daughter, my husband, my wife, that changed my life irrevocably, and I hate them. And I hate their belief system that made the death of my loved one possible. Hate is a powerful and energizing emotion. It can give a person a reason to keep living. I have experienced it in my own life as a way to cope, and as the way through grief.
But not as an end point.
Because hate is exhausting and it doesn't bring back the person who was taken away. In the end, it doesn't take away our pain. It just means that each and every time I get triggered, I feel the powerful sense of loss, engulfing sadness, and anger, again, over and over. Reverend Deborah L. Johnson says, "Hating someone is like drinking a bottle of poison and expecting the person you hate to die." At some point, either you have to forgive, or you drink just enough of the poison to not kill you, and it colors your life day in and day out. I don't want to come off as telling anyone how to grieve or how to heal. I don't pretend to have a clue what it must be like to have lost someone I cared for in 9/11. But I know a little about how anger and hatred eat away at you. And, I do know keeping this Islamic Center from being built will not eliminate terrorism, punish the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, or bring justice to those who were unjustly slaughtered on 9/11.
Having an Islamic Center near Ground Zero that is a symbol of peaceful Islam, whose mission is building interfaith bridges, IS a way to bring justice to those who were killed on 9/11. To say, in the face of the easy way -- of retreating to tribe and family and fear -- "No! I stand with my brothers and sisters, who mourned with me when those planes struck the WTC buildings, no matter his or her faith." That is the way to move beyond hate. To stretch beyond the anger and hatred that has been giving us a reason to live and live for a reason to love, everyone, even if you don't like them all the time, or even ever. That is the way to best honor those who have died, and to hold to our principles as a nation.
What I see on both sides of this debate is fear. For those of us who support the building of the Islamic Center, we fear the eroding of fundamental rights, we fear where all this could be going. If you happen to Muslim, you may also fear being targeted for discrimination, or worse, being the target of violence as tensions mount. For those in opposition, I imagine the fear is around not having their pain and loss honored in ways that they want. At the root of these fears, it's the same: whether or not we support or oppose this proposed center, we fear that we will not be seen for our humanity; that we will not be honored, or treated fairly.
Fearing our grief, our pain, or those who have caused it, keeps it alive. Fear keeps us from remembering that our fates are intertwined, and that our obligations run deeper than to just our loved ones. We are obligated to each other, to hold each other in love. As a nation, we are challenged by forces that remind us of our divisions, of how different we are from one another. But we have a choice: we can find the beauty and strength in the ways we are different, and allow innovative solutions to arise from them, or we can retreat, pull into our own, say we cannot be like one another, demand that our way is the right way, and we will perish in our promise to be a different kind of nation, we will fail to live up to the best in us that can withstand tragedy and remain inclusive.
There IS a way to celebrate the lives of those we lost on 9/11 AND honor our founding principles as a nation in allowing this Islamic Center to be built. Let's find the way together, people! In the words of our beloved Martin Luther King, Jr. "“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Let us work toward making our inescapable network of mutuality the starting point for progress.
Here it is, yet another witty blog from a super liberal, white, single 30-something in Northern California to comment on life's meanderings. Just what the internet needs! Writing is my calling, and I'm getting ready for it to become my career. Common themes in my writing are nature/spirituality, social justice, sex/relationships, and beautiful things. Man, that could so be a blog entry on Stuff White People Like, which, if you haven't seen, is truly priceless.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Singing
Here's next month's entry for the Sun's Readers Write.
I was eight or nine, with a friend in her room, playing Monopoly, a Belinda Carlise tape playing in the background, when I discovered I sang terribly. It was the 80s and before I could distinguish great music from popular music and I loved Belinda Carlisle, and even more I loved her song “Heaven is a Place on Earth.” When that track came on, I belted out the lyrics and imitated Belinda Carlisle from her ultra-dramatic video performance.
My friend got antsy all of sudden, shifting and looking up at me several times in irritated glances. After a minute or so, she looked straight at me, her round, clear blue eyes boring into me, and said, “Mandie, could you stop singing? I’m trying to enjoy the song and you have a terrible voice.”
It felt like she’d hurled a brick into my chest and my eyes prickled with tears. Ever the pleaser, I swallowed hard, and apologized. And I never forgot that I couldn’t sing.
Yet, when it came time to pick electives for junior high, I saw “choir” and checked the box. I remember thinking, I’ll sing really low so no one discovers my terrible voice and if the song is really hard, I’ll just mouth the words. I stayed in school choirs for the next four years. I loved the music, the way each part had a role to play, how the altos had to set the harmony, the sopranos kept the melody going, while the tenors and basses added depth and richness. I was thrilled when we’d come together and sound like one voice. Singing, just being around singers, soothed me, made me feel at home in my body and comfortable with my peers, such a precious thing in adolescence.
In high school, my choir teacher realized I was faking it, and talked with me about it. I was so embarrassed I’d been found out, that I didn’t sign up for choir the next semester, even though every time I passed by the choir room, my heart swelled with longing.
But some things have a way of choosing you and you can't ever escape.
A few weeks ago, I held a live mic in my hand, opened my mouth, sang, and it was good. For a few minutes, music lifted me from nervous self-absorption into its ancient arms, and poured through me like a sieve. There was this moment, just after I’d closed the song and just before anxiety about my performance fell back into it’s familiar groove, that the enormity of what I’d just accomplished was suspended on my voice teacher’s face and I knew, without any trace of ego to take it away, that I’d sounded, actually, quite beautiful. To the wounded nine-year old who wrapped herself around my vocal cords the day she demanded I stop my offensive singing, I say, “Oh honey, what a load of shit that was. Stop letting her hold you back from sharing that fabulous voice of yours.”
I was eight or nine, with a friend in her room, playing Monopoly, a Belinda Carlise tape playing in the background, when I discovered I sang terribly. It was the 80s and before I could distinguish great music from popular music and I loved Belinda Carlisle, and even more I loved her song “Heaven is a Place on Earth.” When that track came on, I belted out the lyrics and imitated Belinda Carlisle from her ultra-dramatic video performance.
My friend got antsy all of sudden, shifting and looking up at me several times in irritated glances. After a minute or so, she looked straight at me, her round, clear blue eyes boring into me, and said, “Mandie, could you stop singing? I’m trying to enjoy the song and you have a terrible voice.”
It felt like she’d hurled a brick into my chest and my eyes prickled with tears. Ever the pleaser, I swallowed hard, and apologized. And I never forgot that I couldn’t sing.
Yet, when it came time to pick electives for junior high, I saw “choir” and checked the box. I remember thinking, I’ll sing really low so no one discovers my terrible voice and if the song is really hard, I’ll just mouth the words. I stayed in school choirs for the next four years. I loved the music, the way each part had a role to play, how the altos had to set the harmony, the sopranos kept the melody going, while the tenors and basses added depth and richness. I was thrilled when we’d come together and sound like one voice. Singing, just being around singers, soothed me, made me feel at home in my body and comfortable with my peers, such a precious thing in adolescence.
In high school, my choir teacher realized I was faking it, and talked with me about it. I was so embarrassed I’d been found out, that I didn’t sign up for choir the next semester, even though every time I passed by the choir room, my heart swelled with longing.
But some things have a way of choosing you and you can't ever escape.
A few weeks ago, I held a live mic in my hand, opened my mouth, sang, and it was good. For a few minutes, music lifted me from nervous self-absorption into its ancient arms, and poured through me like a sieve. There was this moment, just after I’d closed the song and just before anxiety about my performance fell back into it’s familiar groove, that the enormity of what I’d just accomplished was suspended on my voice teacher’s face and I knew, without any trace of ego to take it away, that I’d sounded, actually, quite beautiful. To the wounded nine-year old who wrapped herself around my vocal cords the day she demanded I stop my offensive singing, I say, “Oh honey, what a load of shit that was. Stop letting her hold you back from sharing that fabulous voice of yours.”
Musings on a full life
So much of my life slips away without ever being imprinted on my memory. What I want to remember is waking up at least ten times to watch my two nieces sleeping next to me last night, or the way three and half year old Avi flung her arm across me, and snuggled her little body into my chest, or the way seven year old Kaia reached across her sister to hold my arm as she was going to sleep.
The expectant expression on Norval’s face the first time he presented a bouquet of flowers to me might not last forever in this fickle sieve of my brain. I might lose the feeling of my heart as it skipped a beat and then sped up the first time an editor of a magazine expressed interest in publishing an essay of mine (just this week!). I’m afraid the night that I helped Bianca paint the bedroom in her apartment a few months ago, and the respective life dilemmas we unraveled that night, will be sloughed off in favor of retaining some remarkable historical event. Will I remember the email my mom sent me this week that prickled my eyes with tears and dissolved any resentment I had about an issue we’ve been working through?
And so we feel love, devotion, excitement, validation, happiness, kinship and forgiveness. And when we come across them again, in the future, something tugs at the edges, a forgotten moment begging to be retrieved. Sometimes, the whole scene will rush back, and sometimes it remains the impression of a feeling, and not the event itself. The thing I may appreciate most about life, though, is that those lost moments will, most likely, repeat themselves in different iterations.
Someday, I will sleep with my own child and this first sleep over with my nieces will come rushing back. If I am lucky, I will see that same look on Norval’s face many times over as we grow together. The first time I get a job in the writing world, I suspect I will see that first email in my head and smile. I trust, despite the ups and downs friendships go through, that Bianca and I will share in some other connecting synergy and one of us will say, “Remember that night we painted in here and we joked about what a good lesbian couple we’d be?” And each time my mother and I find that we understand each other better than we already do, I suspect I’ll get a little teary.
The longer I live, the more I see that the common denominators of life – joy, love, companionship – will bestow their grace in perpetuity, so perhaps there is no need to hold on to any one of them as though they are in limited supply.
The expectant expression on Norval’s face the first time he presented a bouquet of flowers to me might not last forever in this fickle sieve of my brain. I might lose the feeling of my heart as it skipped a beat and then sped up the first time an editor of a magazine expressed interest in publishing an essay of mine (just this week!). I’m afraid the night that I helped Bianca paint the bedroom in her apartment a few months ago, and the respective life dilemmas we unraveled that night, will be sloughed off in favor of retaining some remarkable historical event. Will I remember the email my mom sent me this week that prickled my eyes with tears and dissolved any resentment I had about an issue we’ve been working through?
And so we feel love, devotion, excitement, validation, happiness, kinship and forgiveness. And when we come across them again, in the future, something tugs at the edges, a forgotten moment begging to be retrieved. Sometimes, the whole scene will rush back, and sometimes it remains the impression of a feeling, and not the event itself. The thing I may appreciate most about life, though, is that those lost moments will, most likely, repeat themselves in different iterations.
Someday, I will sleep with my own child and this first sleep over with my nieces will come rushing back. If I am lucky, I will see that same look on Norval’s face many times over as we grow together. The first time I get a job in the writing world, I suspect I will see that first email in my head and smile. I trust, despite the ups and downs friendships go through, that Bianca and I will share in some other connecting synergy and one of us will say, “Remember that night we painted in here and we joked about what a good lesbian couple we’d be?” And each time my mother and I find that we understand each other better than we already do, I suspect I’ll get a little teary.
The longer I live, the more I see that the common denominators of life – joy, love, companionship – will bestow their grace in perpetuity, so perhaps there is no need to hold on to any one of them as though they are in limited supply.
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