Pogo was right

I didn’t seriously think it would happen in my lifetime. Of course you always have those doomsday scenarios in the back of your mind, but it’s different when it starts to become real.

I have lots of friends who are German, all of whom are far too young to remember when that country let itself be killed from the inside. But they are all acutely aware of that death, and the terrible pain of rebirth after such a horror. They will likely understand what I’m talking about more than will folks living in the U.S.

Because now it’s coming here, the death. I didn’t pay much attention when it was just the professional jackasses — the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins, and other cynical jokers making money hand over fist by stoking hate. You always get that kind of thing in a democracy. The more outrageously the fools on the fringe are pulling down their pants, the more you can be sure your free society is functioning. A free society can tolerate hate, and we don’t feel a need to suppress it because we know we won’t succumb to it.

But then good, decent people, educated people, people in my own family, started turning off their brains and muttering darkly about a “Ground Zero Mosque” where terrorists could gather to plot another attack.

The fact that there is nothing further in this world from a radical Islamicist than an American Sufi seems to be off the radar. I’m not even sure that people realize what a Sufi is. Sufis are to Islam what Quakers are to Christianity. They’re the pacifists, the conscientious objectors, the ones who believe in tending to the poor and sick, who believe in humility and universal tolerance, in reaching out in friendship to people who are different.

That the American people could be tricked en masse into believing that a community center built by Sufis — of all people! — is somehow an infiltration by a radical militant Islamic force, tells me that our nation’s brain cells have started to die. It happened in Germany, and now it is starting to happen to us.

We are on our way to becoming a nation of drooling, blithering idiots, stumbling in the dark and babbling nonsense like “it’s disrespectful to build a Mosque at Ground Zero.” Except it’s not a Mosque, and it’s not at Ground Zero. And that’s not even the most important thing.

The most important thing is to consider the following: Which group of Americans was most brutally harmed by the destruction of the World Trade Center? Was it the Italians, the Jews? Maybe the Irish?

Nope. Which group of Americans essentially got their eyes gouged out, their hearts ripped to pieces, their deepest dreams spat upon and crushed underfoot? Which Americans had to watch helplessly while someone effectively held their own children in front of them, their pride and joy, put a gun to those kids’ futures and pulled the trigger?

If you’re like most Americans, you probably harbor a silly fantasy that you have more reason to hate the bastards who took down the twin towers than anyone else does. But of course you’re wrong. In fact, you have no idea.

Reason to hate is watching somebody destroy everything you’ve spent your life building. Reason to hate is watching your beautiful young sons and daughters, U.S. citizens born in this country, who always believed in its promise of liberty and equality, suddenly finding their friends and community turning on them with suspicion.

Can you imagine anybody with more reason to hate than the American Sufis? And yet, their response is to build a community center open to all, a gesture of peace and interfaith community in the middle of all the hatred.

The fact that we are not even paying attention to who these people actually are, the fact that the majority of Americans — even New Yorkers, I am deeply ashamed to say — are mouthing off hateful idiocies easily refuted by a simple Google search, tells me that it may already be too late.

We’re already half way to wearing the swastikas, and darkly muttering “kill the Jews”, except this time it’s not Jews. We are idiotically demonizing our own peace loving friends and neighbors who are the enemy of the Taliban, and all it stands for, to an extent we cannot even imagine.

I see this beautiful nation melting down, its brain cells failing, becoming necrotic. Much as I would like to blame it on the rancid self-serving poison of the Sarah Palins and bastards like pastor Jones who wants to publicly burn the Koran, I know that would be dishonest. For it is not them, it is us.

John F. Kennedy once said: “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” Yes, I know we are a wounded nation, I appreciate that. But rather than rise to the occasion, rather than face the hard and complicated truth of our circumstance, we are letting ourselves be anaesthetized by convenient myth, and that way leads to the sleep of the waking dead.

Unless we wake up in time. I sincerely hope we wake up in time.