Apparently, today is Punish A Muslim Day… just in case you wanted to have some warm-fuzzies about the cretans and buttmunches who exist, seemingly, for the sole purpose of bringing down our collective IQ.
Actually, the humanity-redeeming aspect has been the resistance of many people to participate or allow it to happen. Cities around the western world took additional security measures to protect their citizens. Non-Muslims made plans to help their friends. Many people have used it to talk frankly about the current state of social affairs, like this article which begins like this:
A flier declares today, April 3, ‘Punish a Muslim’ Day in the U.S. and the U.K., offering 100 points for beating up a Muslim. But it’s not as if everything will be fine on April 4…
A flier declares today, April 3, ‘Punish a Muslim’ Day in the U.S. and the U.K., offering 100 points for beating up a Muslim. But it’s not as if everything will be fine on April 4…
I’ve seen people justify this violence, hatred, and bigotry not just for this particular day, but in all the ways it manifests in regular life.
The ugliness fueled by resentment – that ol’ culture-killing virus – and other unresolved feelings has reared its head often and with vigor… and when will enough be enough?
I asked twitter what it means that:
- People have reached such angry lengths, and
- So many others just CANNOT believe that such ugliness can exist.
Because it seems pretty obvious that so many people are hurting. Hurt people often create more hurt. The Austin bomber. The guy who shot up the black church. The people who wish violence and death and pain on others. And all the ways all these things are excused and confused.
Justifications pulled from all the corners of human ego and dogmatic desperation.
The spin put on issues to distract from their cores, from the humanity behind everything, from the level of examination that would lead people to resolution rather than conflict.
This day encouraging crusade-like fervor is gross. It’s taking the low road. It’s disrespectful and disgusting, destructive and despicable… it serves nothing good.
And I wonder, sometimes, which side of the issue I would fall on if my life had taken different turns here and there.
Because I’ve been the person who would participate in singling out non-Christians, of removing a person’s humanity – the thing that connects us first – because of superficial, ideological categorizations.
I. Was. That. Person. Once.
The once and former bigot… geez. I think that’s why it bothers me so much that, more than the people, the ideas exist to be this way… then it circles around to that someone had to set it off, and that people fail to examine these things personally to ask themselves what it perpetuates & then have those conversations amongst themselves.
[pulls up The Banality of Evil ebook]
I mean…
This trajectory is not an admirable, productive, or sustainable one. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.