9/11

WAAAAAooooOOOOHhhhHHH!

That was the politics siren. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

***

Dear people who do not want a Muslim oriented center at Ground Zero:

Your feelings, I am sure, are very strong. They most likely seem very real to you, and because of that, you believe they lend legitimacy to your argument against building a mosque or any Muslim themed center at that particular location.

They do not.

Simply because you feel something does not make it real. As someone who has long managed an interesting stable of unpredictable mental illnesses, let me tell you that feelings are more often than not based on erroneous information, incomplete ideas, and faulty wiring. To speak about how you felt watching the towers come down in the same breath as your objection to construction at ground zero does not make your argument valid. In my opinion, it detracts.

Since very few others will say it, I will. On a human level, 9/11 was a tragedy. We should all respect and mourn those who died there. We should hold the rescue workers, fireman, and brave civilians who reached out, often at great cost, to help their fellow man in our hearts forever.

But 9/11 was not the greatest tragedy to occur, ever, and I am sick of people talking about it like it was. We reacted so strongly as a country partly because we are sheltered and privileged. It is nigh racist the way we go on about how terrible it was and how traumatized we are. We are, on a government level, allright with causing similar tragedies but we are not equipped to deal with it when it happens to us. At the very least it is a distressingly USA centric attitude and one that I feel requires great revision.

Furthermore, to prevent the construction at ground zero sends a clear message. It sends a message of bigotry and reactionary emotion. To paint all Muslims with the extremist brush harkens back to the worst days of American propaganda. It speaks of fear, and hatred, and the creation of a false Other.

For me the construction of a mosque/community center at ground zero is a message of hope and peace. Yes, of course there are political forces at work that have different agendas. But on a basic human level, it says: we will not be bullied in to a black and white mindset by a ragged group of extremists. We will not succumb to terror and ignorance and shut out Americans, we will not give up our religious freedoms, and we will not widen the divide between faiths and peoples.

The Muslims who would worship at the mosque/community center are Americans. That is supposed to matter. We are supposed to stand together and stand under the banner of freedom. Don't just talk about freedom. Don't just circle jerk one another about how great and tolerant we are. Make it real.

Support the construction. Read the Quran instead of burning it. Think instead of giving in to dumb base emotion.

That is freedom.

the controversy meter!

Today the controversy is sex wherein one of the participants is underage.

My current WIP, The Bittersweet Vine, features this controversy as one of its major romantic subplots.

Recently I came across a small press that forbids underage sex. It's something the morality police particularly loathe, or so it would seem. I, however, think the idea that characters in novels should whip out two forms of government issued identification before having sex is odd and in some ways a trifle offensive.

It's such an American/Western idea! It's not something we like to think about, perhaps, but there are many cultures that operate on different norms than ours. Those cultures sometimes have definite ideas about age, sex, and adulthood that differ from the American perspective. Even in our own country, the legal age of consent is often younger than the assumed eighteen.

Not to give too much information, but I was certainly not eighteen when I first had sex. (as an aside the people I know who were over eighteen are invariably male. Go figure) No one I knew was over eighteen at the time, either, other than the exceptions covered by my bracketed statement.

What I am trying to say is that I find moral ambiguity and the reality of people's messy, inconvenient lives much more interesting than things that are considered proper. Real life is not an orderly thing, wherein we all fall in love with the people best suited to us.

How about you, though? Do you ever write about this topic? If so, how do you handle it?

like a piece of chocolate.

this rant is short, enjoyable, and makes the person indulging feel ever so slightly guilty.

Look, if you hate e-books then I don't want to hear about it.

I hate to be negative (I don't hate to be negative) but I have no idea why print is so fetishized. Books are lovely things, and they can absorb a lot of nostalgia, but the words themselves should be the important part. You aren't all getting high of the glue they use to bind the pages, are you? IS THAT THE SECRET?

Furthermore, I am blind. I have some vision but a lot of times, I'm forced to pass on print books because I can't comfortably read them. If it weren't for my Kindle I wouldn't read nearly as much. That would be a Bad Thing.

So next time anyone out there wants to trash e-books, please think of the poor blind kids. And kittens. Because when you diss e-books, God kills one. (I am pretty sure that last part is totally true)

E-books are also green.