"...And we shall never forget...."

United We Stand

        Nine years ago yesterday, a rather hateful (and, unfortunately incredibly well organized) group of people decided it would be a good idea to crash several planes into important sites on the East Coast of the United States of America, including the Pentagon, The World Trade Center in New York and the Capitol in Washington DC (although the latter was diverted by some very brave passengers who managed to crash-land in a field somewhere in rural Pennsylvania).  This is an event that has shaped the national consciousness for the better part of the last decade, and has had an especially profound impact upon people of my generation, who had viewed the events on television as children, and who grew up in the era of the so-called "War on Terror."  As a child of seven or eight, I remember my parents reading news stories of an upsurge in anti-Muslim sentiment directly following the attacks, and I remember them telling me that the people in the stories were wrong and bigoted and that an entire group of people should not be held accountable for the actions of extremists and that I should never judge a person merely because of how he looked.  To my seven-year-old brain, this logic seemed perfectly sound, and I accepted it as fact that the attacks on the Twin Towers were the fault of a few crazy people, and that it didn't particularly matter to which deity they prayed.  As a young adult, I now see, unfortunately, that not everyone's parents instilled in them comparable values of tolerance.  The hate speech I have seen in the media these past few months contains echoes to the time of Japanese Internment that I have only read about in history books.  I just don't understand how a person can justify being so very intolerant, so bigoted.
         About a month and a half ago, while visiting cousins in New York, I actually visited the remains of the World Trade Center, now little more than a large construction site, with nary a trace of rubble.  My cousin, who was so kindly driving me around on a tour of the city, and who had known several people who had lost family members in the attacks, made a point of remarking that she acknowledged that the proposed building of the Muslim cultural center would certainly pour salt in some still-open wounds, but that she herself had no personal problem with it.  At the time I was visiting, I knew very little about the proposed center, and so was surprised to discover that it was not proposed to be right next door to the gaping structural chasm that had once been two very tall buildings, but several blocks away in a rather large building that had once housed a Burlington Coat Factory.  I am sad to say that, from my following of the story since my return, many Americans are still ignorant of the fact that the proposed cultural center will not be built upon the actual foundation of the World Trade Center and that al-Qaeda is not actually behind the building of said mosque.  Such propositions sound rather ludicrous, but people are liable to believe all sorts of untrue things, when blinded by hatred.
          And speaking of hatred, as if the outcry against the mosque (which is actually a cultural center) wasn't bad enough--seriously, this country was, well founded upon the principle of freedom of religion--a rather inflammatory pastor from Gainesville, Florida thought he would take all the anti-Muslim sentiment a bit further and actually burn the Quran on the anniversary of the attacks.  Fortunately, the volume of public outcry got the best of Mr. Terry Jones (who, I am sad to say, is not the lovable Monty Python cast member best remembered for his falsetto female impersonations).  However, the fact that such a thing would be proposed (and supported, both covertly, and overtly by a worryingly large minority of the population) disgusts me.  Politicians love to wax on quite romantically about how we live in a post-racial society, chock full of religious tolerance and devoid of bigotry, but clearly this is not the case.
          I know it's probably quite idealistic of me, but I hope that I will one day live in a society that celebrates the building of mosques (and all other houses of worship, for that matter), and does not accuse the president of being a Muslim, but accepts it. Yes, it is true, that I shall never forget the events of the eleventh of September, two thousand one, but it is equally true that I will never forget that, instead of stepping up to heal its wounds in a way that encouraged tolerance, our great nation turned its back on a minority and allowed bigotry to flourish and re-emerge even stronger nearly a decade later.