Imagine this.
It's a busy Saturday at Gurnee Mills, or Mall of America, or your local outdoor market. Maybe it's the holidays.
You wander through the mall looking for, I dunno, a new cheese grater. A fancy one designed by Emeril or something. You feel the familiar frustrations of trying to navigate a busy shopping center. You weave back and forth down the wide hallways, avoiding the packs of giggling teenagers. You hurry past the senior citizens who seem to have no notion of the bustle around them, and move accordingly.
Something at a kiosk in the center of the thoroughfare catches your eye, a "Bushisms 2008 Desk Calandar". You stop to read the insane quotations like "Too many OB/GYN's are not allowed to practice their love with women all across this country". As you laugh about our wacky Commander-in-Chief, you notice someone out of the corner of your eye. Amid all the hustle of people going about their weekend shopping, there's someone standing there. Just standing there. This seems slightly odd, but they're probably just waiting for someone. Anyways, back to the calendar.
As you try to focus, you notice the person walk to the next kiosk down - a particularly busy kiosk selling religous books and videos. "Well there," you think. "I knew he was waiting for something...he just wanted to wait for the line to die down."
"It's in our country's best interests to find those who would do us harm and get them out of harm's way." Ahhhh, such hilarious eloquence!
"GOD IS GREAT!!!!!"
As you look up from your Dubya calendar you have just enough time to see the former object of your curiosity blow himself up before the world goes black.
I didn't write this because I'm trying to make a political statement. Honestly. This is just a variation of the play that goes on in my head everytime I hear that a bus was bombed in Jerusalem, a building in Kenya, or a busy market in Baghdad. What is the terrorists weren't Sunni or Shi'a, but Evangelicals or Catholics? What if this happened in Detroit or Boulder or Raleigh instead of "over there"?
What would make a person do this to another person? Surely, it would be horribly ignorant to say that there is something less human about members of another religion. Even members of a small faction of another religion. You may have seen pictures of suicide bombers preparing to die for their God. Aside from the bomb belts, they look like normal people who could live in your neighborhood. Why then?
This sort of thing happens to people every day. Why do we only get worked up when it happens in New York or Washington? I'm not debating the merits of a Global War on Terror. I'm talking about human suffering that we should all get worked up about, when it happens to anyone. It's very easy to become desensitized to this violence when we see the reports about it every day on the news. We say, "Oh, those poor people in that foreign country. How horrible!" We should say, and not as Americans but as people, "Our fellow human beings are killing each other...over God! We need to stop this immediately" In my opinion, we are all equally culpable for these problems.
