Posts Tagged ‘mikeyhemlok’

American hatred

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Another mikeyhemlok article from the “Attackerman” blog: “Getting Ugly Out There“:

I’m getting increasingly uncomfortable with where we find ourselves going. It’s moving quickly past mere reprehensible politics, fueling itself with more vitriol, more lies, more fear and more hatred, taking us all too fast to a place that, as an American, I believed was behind us for good …

So I look around, at all the racial and ethnic hatred spewing forth from every corner, and I wonder where we can go from here. Is there a path back from all this, or have we passed some kind of tipping point from which there is no return? Will it all fade away after November, or have we lit the fuse and now stand helpless, perhaps even regretful, as we await the inevitable explosion? This all seems like such a very, very bad idea. As the rhetoric gets uglier, the hatred more explicit, it can only be a matter of time before somebody feels threatened enough to push back, and then somebody is going to die. And at that moment, when, shocked into silence, we all hesitate and draw a collective breath and wonder if we should just stop and think, talk to each other, LISTEN to each other, will we have it within ourselves as Americans to back away? Or will we, the most heavily armed nation in the world, reach for our weapons and go to war against ourselves?

Cordoba House

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

I could go on-and-on about the Cordoba House Mosque and Islamic Center controversy all day. But most of my thoughts are being said elsewhere on the internet tubes, so why not link to them instead?

One of the blogs I regularly read is Spencer Ackerman’s “Attackerman”. Lately he’s had guest posts, and one gentleman (at least, I think he’s a he) “mikeyhemlok” and I agree on many topics. His post on the Cordoba House is pretty fantastic: “It’s Not About THEM, It’s About Us.”

It’s a short article, I almost pasted the whole thing here but this is the key:

No matter how you personally feel about Muslims and mosques, you have to recognize that this is a one-way trip, a simple, irreversible binary choice. As there can be no real doubt that the Imam and his congregation have every right to build their mosque where they wish, it comes down to something more nuanced, and much more pernicious. Do you want people, either by dint of their popular majority or their frantic shrieking and hand-waving to have the power to over-rule the basic rights and freedoms granted to all Americans? Do you understand that if it’s just Muslims today, it will be Jews tomorrow and atheists after that and in the end, the battle for the smouldering rubble of the American experiment will be fought between Catholics and Protestants, with the victors laying claim to just another totalitarian theocracy?

It truly makes me wonder. Can even the likes of Gingrich and Palin actually be proud of an America so willing to run away from her core values? In the name of political expediency and tribal nativism, balanced against all the history and sacrifice that has come before? If they actually got their way, and Cordoba House project was blocked, would they see it as a bright and shining moment for America? Or would it be a Pyrrhic victory, with the taste of ashes, as they wondered if it could be a Mosque in New York today, might it be a Church in Kansas or a book in Georgia or a political party in South Carolina tomorrow.