October 9, 2008

• The Question

  There is an elephant in the corner and we will ignore it. I can’t fix it, I can’t change it–I can’t disarm it–and I can’t make it go away.

  The day has every appearance of being a beautiful day. The sun has returned to the Midwest. The high today is supposed to be around 70 degrees.

  Breezing along in the sunshine, I just read a Xanga blog that warned me that electing Obama would be putting a terrorist in the White House. The reasoning was that ‘Osama’ and ‘Obama’ sound alike to the Western ear, Obama’s father was Muslim, and Barack’s middle name is Hossein. So Osama Bin Laden did not disappear in Afghanistan, he is alive and well and running for President of the United States.

   My partner looked up some statistics on the internet last night (I know: beware most things posted on the internet) and a company I had heard of before had done a study and determined that the United States has the highest percentage of people reporting a religious affiliation of any industrialized nation in the world. 78% of Americans are Christian. 78% of the people bemoaning the godless quality of this nation…are Christians. 0.008% of the people living in the US are Muslims. So if it were less than coincidence that ‘Obama’ and ’Osama’ sound alike to the redneck ear and if Hossein were an exotic and uncommon Muslim name (I think it’s a lot like ‘John’ among the Christians) and if being Muslim automatically made a person a terrorist (like, for example, being white automatically made a person an active member in the KKK, or, for that matter, an active participant in any political process), we could safely elect Barack Hossein Obama/Osama to the white house and he and his 0.008% muslim radicals would…do what? Convert the Christians? Pass a whole bunch of laws that turn out to mean something completely different that what they appeared to mean? (Check out the No Child Left Behind program. Check out welfare, check out Medicare…the list is endless.) I believe the threat of terrorism is very real, and I think the greatest threat we face is not acts of terrorism–or even that a religious minority might sneak into the White House in the guise of a mild-mannered senator from Chicago–but rather the incredibly stupid kneejerk reactions we allow to run amok in response to it (think, The Patriot Act.)

  1776: “Freedom…”

  1876: “Freedom…”

  1976: “Freedom…”

  2001: “Screw that, get the terrorists.”

  But I am not a political animal. I have my beliefs, you have yours. 

  The elephant in the room is the fact that my partner’s daughter is sick again. She’s in the hospital. She is suffering an unprovoked attack of pancreatitis, which is painful enough that they’ve put her on morphine. Rae has struggled with this disease for six years now, and while she rallies, each ensuing attack works a little harder on her nerves and on the nerves of all of us who love her. You can’t fix it either.

  I am not a Christian. I am one of the 15% of American citizens who would not list any religious affiliation. I believe that Christ–and Mohammed, and Budda, and several others–were much more highly evolved beings than most of us, and I believe that if we understood what they were really saying, we would all be better people for it. Unfortunately, Christianity lends itself well to a joyless and dispirited memorization of rules and poorly-translated Biblical passages that lead us to ask ourselves questions like, “if there is a God in heaven, why would He allow Ranee to suffer like this?”

  This is based, of course, on the assumption that perfection in everything is the norm,  that each of us somehow ‘deserves’ whatever happens to us. Our behavior is punished or rewarded by the universe act for act.

  That wasn’t what the man was saying. 

  Still, I struggle to climb that mountain in order to see what lies beyond it. The question is wrong, or it’s the wrong question.

  I don’t know what the right question is.  

  • 9:57 am
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