On fear

"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.