By Odeisel

Patriotism was once a shining shield intended to protect this country from threats internal and foreign. It is now a lance used to pierce the veil of decency and common sense. It was used by a former president to draft a country to war in a period of uncertainly and vulnerability. Now on the anniversary of perhaps America’s greatest loss, “patriots” are upholding ideas that run counter to the very ideas that founded this country.

Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building with a day care center. The blast damaged buildings in a 16 block radius. McVeigh was a Christian. An American Christian who considered himself a patriot. There were no movements to torch the New Testament or to stop the Gideons from leaving bibles in our hotel rooms. No churches were threatened with imminent destruction. While America mourned and got behind that community in their attempts to rebuild, there were no calls for the heads of people who share what McVeigh represented. We did what Americans are supposed to do: we mourned, we rebuilt and we moved on.

As we near the ninth anniversary of the September 11^th tragedy, America is in the midst of an identity crisis that threatens to alter the essence of its being. We continue to mourn, we haven’t rebuilt and we are far from moving on. We have taken to complaining instead of creating, and excluding those who are supposedly different, when the very success of the American experiment was the collusion of varying ideals. We’re outlawing how people dress.  We are persecuting those who speak in defense of American ideals. And 9 years later, in a city where skyscrapers are commonplace, there is still a big hole in the ground.

As an American, with freedom of speech, and religion, et al, I’m sure the burning of books falls into those freedoms. They aren’t anyone’s property. Burning then won’t hurt anyone physically (at least not directly). The intolerance probably flies into the face of whatever God that pastor in Florida (can’t bring myself to give him any more publicity) represents, but as a citizen he’s within his rights. Just as there’s nothing wrong with being Muslim in America. Only if people started burning bibles in the “one nation under God” I’m sure they would have either been dismissed immediately as a quack, or summarily snuffed out by public opinion.

Freedom is a double edged sword that must be tempered with proper vigilance and cooperation. You don’t have to like or accept anyone else’s beliefs. That’s the beauty of freedom. But there should be an inherent understanding that all beliefs should be protected because the moment someone can come for the next man’s beliefs, they can come for yours. As we watch people actually support someone’s attempt to deny the religious freedom of a fairly large section of Americans with his Quran burning, let’s recognize the very first Amendment for what it is. We’ve had far more terrorist attacks on American soil by Christians and far more by resident citizens and whites than there have ever been by foreigners and minorities. The Quran, nor the Bible have nothing to do with any of them. They are books. The ideologies housed within each of those books don’t speak to terror, nor do they speak to victimizing innocents.

The best thing we can do as survivors and as citizens is to uphold the principles of the Constitution. We must  embrace the true tenets of the American ideal. We must collectively defend each other from the encroachment on our rights. And most importantly, we must fill that hole in the ground with a building. Then we can finally get back to being Americans. We will have mourned. We will have rebuilt. And we could finally begin to move on.

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