Divine Nation

Since when did ‘Muslim’ become an insult? When did our fear override of common sense, our sense of decency, or our sense of self? ‘Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ Unless they’re Muslim. Then they get sent to Gitmo.

I’ve been hearing some serious shit on the street of late, and from what I understand basically the people I’m hearing want to turn this country into an extended version of Sarajevo. Anyone out there even remember the Bosnian War and what was happening? That entire conflict was Bosnian Serbs vs. Muslims, and the Serbs were killing every single Muslim they came across, unless of course said Muslims were being dumped into concentration camps where prisoners were tortured, sexually mutilated, then executed. Which, remarkably, is the kind of thing people are not totally against for Muslims in this country. People in this country, of various walks of life, talking in public about how we should just bomb the entire Middle East and have done with it, and how all Muslims should just be shot. It’s called Ethnic Cleansing, and you want to bring it to our home turf? Do they have meds available for that level of bat-shit crazy?!

Forget Muslim as an insult. There was a time when being Muslim was a death sentence, and in the not too distant past. Then again, so was being Jewish, being Pagan, being gay, being a woman and walking around with being covered in a formless black swath and wearing shoes that render every step silent. Need I go on? Give me a fucking break, people.

I wonder if any of the people spewing this filth have ever even seen a copy of the Koran, let alone read it. Some of the imagery is absolutely beautiful, and believe it or not it’s not a big book of ‘do as Allah says or we blow you up.’

Fanaticism is horrendous and ugly no matter who is spewing it or who its being spewed at, and it’s not necessary. We have enough shit to worry about right now; we don’t need to be killing people in our own backyard just because they don’t happen to worship the way we’re used to.

My mother, love her so dearly, actually coined a thought process that I subscribe to whole-heartedly: what if we’re all right? The Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, the Pagans, what if it’s all true? What if this great, amazing ‘force’ (No Star Wars references please, just stay with me) that allows life to exist and created it from what was before is so great and vast and incomprehensible that we simply can’t narrow it down to one form of understanding? What if it more like a diamond, with hundreds of thousands of facets, or faces? And what if each face is a different religious or belief structure, depending on the person or people looking up in wonderment? That would mean that this great ‘thing’ has the power to be whatever we need it to be, in whatever form we need it to take, to understand what ‘it’ is, and our connection to it.

The Divine is not something any of us has a right to narrow down beyond ourselves, because truly, the only point of reference we can ever have in full is our own. So who are we to say that someone else’s belief, or view of the Divine, is invalid? No one has that right, and no one has the right nor the obligation to give up their beliefs for the sake of government, society, or culture. We are individuals for a reasons, and there are as many faces of the Divine as there are each of us, because the Divine exists within each of us. It is our life, it is our breath, and thus it is our words. Are you speaking for the Divine today?