watching my boyfriend pray, prostrate – standing – prostrate – standing, lips moving hands heaveward, and i can’t help but wonder why his is any less reverential to america then my mother on bended knees eyes closed, hands clasped praying for me.
it is comforting for me to be around either…something peaceful about people refocusing daily energy to say thank you or to ask for help or forgiveness.
and while i know the world is full of people who do horrible things in the name of God, those people bastardize a whole lot of beliefs, besmirch a multitude of faithfuls.
reading about the latest terrorist bust in the us and i find myself uneasy for any number of reasons. distrust tops the list…but so does alienation. one of the stories i read had a sister of one of the suspect saying and then reiterating – over and over again – “he’s catholic”. trying to remove her brother from any such affiliation.
and it may be true. he may be catholic and that may be a valid defense…but something about the urgency i read into it (i’ll admit i read that i didn’t hear her) makes me cringe a little. like i did when racial profiling was taking place in the states with a new target…people who were a little lighter brown and who had different sounding names. and instead of indignation at the continuation of an unfair and biased practice i found many black folks instead distancing themselves from the newly targeted.
it seems we are all quick to forget what victimization feels like once the spotlight is lifted and we are allowed offstage for a respite.
and so it goes again…the raised threat will once again be young black men, already suspected of so much what is the addition of terrorist to the list? and accompanying that will be muslims, already the focus of so much misinformation and fear who will notice this new slight.
but i feel it. i grieve for it. not just because it represents my boyfriend and another close friend, but becuase persecution has a wandering eye and i am not fool enough to believe this is some random mistake that will rectify itself…it won’t…it just keeps wandering.
a continuation:
my boyfriend said that he saw this as a defense of indefensible acts, if they are indeed guilty. i want to be clear, my disgust and concern are less with them – i’ll reserve that for actual evidence and a trial – when i refer to victimization i am referring to the masses of folks that suffer from the media attention on the details that become gernalizations about race or religion. i’m thinking of my girlfriend getting stopped EVERY SINGLE TIME she flies in a “random” search that is farcical at this point.
and i speak from my own hysteria that i found myself drawn into so easily during katrina – one a friend tried to bring me back from but that took distance and recovering from my own devestation and depression to see…how easily we all believed the horror stories we heard, how quick we were to let marshall law be declared.
i only hope that this case doesn’t encourage similar hysteria. verdict before court, sentences for all who look or pray like these seven may look or pray.