Mosques, 9/11, and Symbolism
I'd like someone to explain this entire "Ground Zero Mosque" hubbub to me. I'm not talking about the oversimplistic pap about "the 9/11 terrorists were Muslim, therefore we shouldn't put up a mosque close to the WTC." That line of thinking only leads to outlawing churches in Oklahoma City because Timothy McVeigh was a Christian.
No, I want to go a bit deeper here. Most of the people who are getting exercised about this mosque seem to forget that there's been a mosque near the Twin Towers since 1970. They also conveniently want to ignore the whole "freedom of religion" thing guaranteed by the First Amendment. (And don't think I'm overlooking that sweetly ironic bit, that those with a strict interpretation of the Constitution ignore parts of it at their leisure.)
Furthermore, as far as I can tell, this is a New York matter, a local matter, a neighborhood matter--yes, that's right, the people who are generally hollering at the top of their lungs about Washington DC getting up in everyone's local business are now on the other side of the argument. And I just don't have time to get into the private property aspects of the entire debacle, let's just say GET OFF MY LAWN.
No, I want to go even further than all that, to another bit of symbolism, because don't kid yourself, this mosque thing is just that: a symbol. The symbol I want to explore is the gas-guzzling SUV.
The sports utility vehicle. Manufactured for years by Detroit, designed to get as little mileage per gallon as possible. Filling one up takes 100 bucks. Those dollars, by and large, flow right back to the Saudi oil sheiks.
Talk about redistribution of wealth: from all parts of this nation to faraway places overseas, where some of those dollars are used to train terrorists and pay for weapons that kill Americans.
Never mind all that, though. The oil's gotta flow, it powers our country, but we couch our overwhelming need for it in terms of "safeguarding our national interests." So we borrow money from the Chinese to fund our military and thus protect "our national interests."
And that is the symbol we call patriotism. Needless to say, it's not patriotic to build a mosque close to a building knocked down by terrorists funded by our gas pumps.
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