Culture Wars

As he brushed by me on the heavily trafficked sidewalk, my automatic response was vigilance. I wanted to keep my eye on this man, to make sure he did not pull any suspicious moves. However, after he brought food over to his wife and children, interacting lovingly with them, I was deeply disappointed with myself.

You see, under normal circumstances, I am extra alert when someone in a crowd makes any sort of bodily contact with me. I see myself as an equal-opportunity kind of guy; I don't trust anyone, no matter what color they are. But something unique about this man made me watch him with heightened suspicion. Maybe it was the turban on his head, or his long beard; perhaps it was his golden skin. Either way, I was confronted with my own depravity.

Our brilliant friends in the media and in Washington have programmed us to view Muslims/Mid-Easterners as prone to violence, creating an internal response that would allow a fair-minded human to watch another with suspicion. It's the same treatment they gave German-Americans during World War I, as well as Japanese-Americans in World War II, even the ones that wanted nothing to do with the conflict.

To those of you who have heard the arguments against Islam, the arguments which caricature a power-hungry, anything-goes militarism, I would say, "Be careful." If you use this argument against them, it will come right back at you. Consider this entirely hypothetical conversation between a white conservative evangelical American and an Arab Muslim from Saudi Arabia:

American: "You people have no value for a human life! How could you take your women and children, and strap a suicide bomb to them?"
Arab: "For the same reasons that you rape yours."

Some points to consider:

-Every culture has its sins. While we hear of bombs going off everywhere in some parts of the world, our own sexually-charged culture has fanned the flames of an ugly epidemic right here in America.

-Just because some sins run rampant within a culture, we cannot assume that ALL within that culture follow suit. All Muslims are not militant any more than all Americans are rapists.

-There are problems within our own contexts with which we need to deal. This involves more than simply showing up to an abortion clinic with protest signs. That accomplishes NOTHING. What we need is more support for those good causes that keep people from falling so far through the cracks that they have nowhere else to turn. It involves supporting Crisis Pregnancy Centers. It involves building relationships with and being a mentor to people who do not have a good example, who may possibly turn to these sins if we sit back and let them.

-Profiling, though supposedly justified by the FBI, has no place within our private lives. We in this country have a problem getting along with people from different backgrounds. It's time we stop doing those things that cause separation and start doing those things that foster understanding.