What Is The Meaning Of This?

It’s always the same after every terror attack in that nothing is ever the same anymore.  Everything we thought we knew must be rethought all over again.  In the week since the attacks in Paris rocked us to our cores, the very meaning of basic principles we thought we once understood are up for debate.  What does Freedom mean?  What does it mean to be Brave?  Or Innocent?

In response to the Charlie Hedbo shooting, and specifically to the Charlie Hedbo shooting, Hamas said “any differences in opinion is no justification for killing innocents.”  Now, why would they say that?  Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s wrong coming from them.  This is the same organization, after all, who indiscriminately fires rockets into Israel to kill anyone they can and more recently instructed Palestinians to drive their cars into crowds of Israelis, resulting in the deaths of a mother and her baby in its stroller.   A baby.  What could that baby have possibly done?  Was it not innocent?  Or according to Hamas, are no Israelis innocent?  Or are the implications even more troubling?

Hamas-run Al Aqsa TV airs a children’s program called The Pioneers of Tomorrow.  It’s a show in the same vein as Barney & Friends in which a young female host named Saraa and costumed characters entertain and interact with their young viewers, callers and in-studio guests.  And disguised in the fun, they also educate with stories and songs and special guests.  They teach the children key life lessons, or as the first mascot of the show, a Mickey Mouse-type named Farfour, put it: “we are placing together the cornerstone for the ruling of the world by an Islamic leadership.”  In that way, it does differ a bit from Barney.

The first element in that cornerstone is pride in speaking Arabic and not English, the crass language of the infidel.  Though, in later seasons, the benefits of knowing the language of the enemy to better understand them is encouraged.  The show presents thought-provoking debates about what to do with the Jews in Israel.  Saraa takes the stance that they should be expelled and left to scatter around the world, while Nassur the bear contends the Jews should be slaughtered.  They ultimately reach a compromise wherein Jews are expelled from Islamic holy lands, but by any means necessary.  So if they won’t go peacefully, then it’s expulsion by slaughter.  Until that time comes, the host and cast of characters encourage children to throw rocks at Jews, shoot them, punch them, kill them, and Assud goes so far as to promote eating them.  And in 2008, when a cartoon came out of Denmark, he broadened his appetite to include Danes.

If there is a central theme of The Pioneers of Tomorrow, it’s the need to protect Islam and the Al Aqsa mosque and take revenge on the criminal infidels who occupy it “by means of morning prayers, blood, sacrifice, and pain by means of martyrs and endurance.”  And to drive home the point, over the life of the show, three of the mascots, Farfour the mouse, his cousin Nahoul the bee, and Nahoul’s brother Assud the rabbit die on screen a martyrs death.  Just in case anyone thought they were getting too preachy and not putting in enough practice.  They even sing the classic “When We Get Martyred” song.  It goes a little something like this- sing along if you know it:

When we get martyred we will go to Paradise.

When we get martyred we will go to Paradise.

No, don’t say we are too small, this life has made us grown ups.

Without Palestine, our childhood means nothing.

Without Palestine, our childhood means nothing.

Even if they gave us all the money in the world, it won’t make us forget.

I am willing to sacrifice my blood for my country.

Without Palestine, our childhood means nothing.

Without Palestine, our childhood means nothing.

Our childhood means nothing…  It’s not just Israel.  In the Radical world of Islam, there simply is no innocents.

The Taliban has been taking advantage of gullible children, coercing and bribing them to be suicide killers for years.  al Qaeda has its Birds of Paradise and Islamic State their Zarqawi’s Cubs Camps where they train prepubescent boys in, and romanticize the life of jihad.  They take their own young and darken their hearts and wash their minds of the ability to make their own choices.  Which is what it means to be Free: to be able to make your own choices.  And standing by those choices in the face of adversity and consequence is what it means to be Brave.  And being Innocent is the ability to make those choices free of prejudice.  And right now, that is not what it means to be Islamic in too much of the Muslim world.  And it's the meaning of Islam which is at stake here.

Howard Dean and President Obama can say the radical terrorists aren’t Islamic, but that’s like the world telling America what it means to play football.  If anything, that just makes America angrier about soccer.  Only Islam can define Islam.  The free world can fight the immediate threat of the radicalized subset of Islam, but the real war is for the innocents of Islam.  Not just for now, but for the future generations of Islam.  Will those generations be future representatives of peace and love or will the innocents be lost to violence and hate?

Right now, those two diametrically opposed sides are making their cases, but one is making theirs a lot louder than the other.  We keep hearing that moderate Islam is condemning terror in the name of Islam, we just don’t hear about it all the time but it's there.  Well, we have to hear it, because we hear the Radicals, and they seem to be winning.  If not the hearts of the world, then the minds.  If moderate Islam is going to win out, they must stand up in the face of Radicalism and in a full throat, with no justification or equivocation, they must condemn the acts and make clear what it means to be Islamic and as they're acts today are defining Islam for today and tomorrow, any acts done in the name of Mohammad are returned in kind on Mohammad.  If you are respectful in the name of Mohammad, then you are respecting Mohammad.  If you love in the name of Mohammad, then you are loving Mohammad.  And if you kill in the name of Mohammad, then you are killing Mohammad.  This must be done, not just for the peace of mind of the rest of the world, and not at all to take ownership of or apologize for Radical Islam, but to save the innocents of Islam, to ensure the meaning of the innocence of Islam.

Nothing But The Truth

On December 18th of last year, The Colbert Report signed off.  Nine years of reporting at people from the gut.  Because as he explained on his first show, when he introduced The Word “Truthiness” to the world, “The truthiness is, anyone can read the news to you; I promise to feel the news at you.”

As it turned out, Colbert was only playing a character, satirizing the prevalence of opinion journalism in today’s media where journalists don’t report the news as much as inform their audience what they feel the news is really about.  In reality, Colbert was making the point that you can’t use feeling as a basis for policy.  Feelings can be misleading.

People feel afraid of household spiders.  They want to crush and flush them, but the reality is spiders are beneficial.  They eat disease-ridden bugs, like mosquitoes and bed bugs, and pests that destroy crops.  In fact, if we got rid of all of the spiders, we would quickly fall into a devastating famine that would threaten the very existence of the human race.  So while we may feel afraid of spiders and feel it necessary to kill them, they’re actually there helping us. And that's a rule which can be applied further. For instance, to the Police.

But that’s part of a conversation we’re about to have.  At least that’s what everyone keeps saying.  That we need to have this conversation.  Though, we’re still waiting for it to begin.  People are talking, yelling and chanting from all sides, but no one seems to be listening to the other.  Yet, somehow, one side has managed to reach their conclusion.

The protesters in New York have demanded the job of NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and an end to the “Broken Windows” policy, in which Police target small crimes in order to curtail an atmosphere where bigger crime can thrive.  A policy which protesters feel endangers their lives.  But just because they feel it, doesn’t make it true.

Mayor de Blasio himself just last month stood up at a press conference to announce that crime in New York City, under this policy, is down to more-than-decade-long lows.  In Newark, one of the most crime infested cities in the country, the “Broken Windows” policy was implemented by now-New Jersey Senator, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker and crime dropped.  In 2010, the mid-point of Sen. Booker’s Newark reign, the city experienced its first murder-free month in more than forty years.  

Yes, feelings are real, but the facts bear out reality.  And the facts are that the Police make neighborhoods, especially dangerous neighborhoods, safer.  So now, with protesters demanding the end of a productive policy and the removal of a Commissioner who has been at it since before most of these protesters were born, and with chants dedicated to men who didn’t deserve to die but whose last acts on earth were criminal, it feels like the protesters aren’t fighting for inherent rights, but for the right to commit crime.

But that’s only a feeling.  And I’ll allow for it be wrong- In fact, I’m sure it will be proven to be so, once we get into the conversation and find the facts that do that.  So where do we start?

We could start with Police arresting minorities at a far greater rate than white people.  But it wouldn’t be a complete picture without mentioning that minorities are caught committing more crimes, so maybe we should start there.  But then why are Police in minority neighborhoods more to make those arrests?  Is it only because minorities neighborhoods provide more opportunity to fill a quota of a rigged system?  But that still doesn’t account for the reason why minority communities provide that opportunity, which seems to set off the entire cycle.  So maybe we should start there.

Or maybe we should go further back.  152 years back.  To New Year’s Day in the year 1863.  The day President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the first of the slaves from that day and henceforward.

 

Now, President Lincoln’s Proclamation didn’t end racism in this country.  It didn’t even entirely end slavery.  The struggle continued for many, many years.  The War itself didn’t end for two more years.  Then there were the fights for equality: To own land.  To work.  To get educated.  To vote.  To sit on a bus.  To be a person.  Heck, the struggle continues now.  It’s a struggle that should never have been necessary, but one that has proven to be immensely valuable and worthwhile, and it was only made possible by that Proclamation and the millions of Americans who conspired to make it happen.  But sometimes it feels like whenever there’s a conversation on race in this country, it carries the undertone, sometimes even an overtone, that this is a nation with slavery and racism at its core.  A tone that ignores the Emancipation Proclamation and the fact that hundreds of thousands of American men died fighting to meet its purpose.  And when they’re sacrifice is washed over, it feels like those men died in vain.

But the fact is those men fought and died for something. And it wasn’t to conquer land, for self preservation, or even to win a voting bloc.  It was for the North.  For the Union.  For freedom.  Because they knew a Truth.  A Truth which was self evident, that all men are created equal and with rights.  Among them: liberty.  The same Truth that less than one hundred years prior, Americans, in their own name, fought and died for.  And it’s that Truth which set the slaves free. Because that’s what the truth does.

Yes, there was slavery in this country.  Yes, America profited from it.  And yes, there is racism in this country today, but it’s not the core of this country.  Freedom and equality is the core.  That’s the truth which the facts bear out.  The lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought for the rights of African men and women prove it.  And that truth, and not some truthiness version of it, must now set us free from the deep-seeded resentment which has infected every conversation this country has ever tried to have on race.  And it is only from that place where we must start and finish the last conversation we should ever have to have on the subject.

OF PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD-WILL TO MEN

On December 10th, the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize was most-deservedly awarded to Mulala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was targeted and shot in the neck and forehead by the Taliban for standing up for education.  She has made a remarkable recovery and has got right back up for education rights for all.  If anything, she has only got stronger, as it goes when what happens doesn’t kill you.  

Many believed she actually deserved the honor last year when, on her 16th birthday and the first Mulala Day, a day to celebrate the power of education, she gave her speech to the Youth Assembly at the UN and spoke of peace, opportunity and education.  She went so far as to say, “I do not even hate the Talib who shot me.  Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me. I would not shoot him. This is the compassion that I have learnt from Muhammad-the prophet of mercy, Jesus christ and Lord Buddha. This is the legacy of change that I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of non-violence that I have learnt from Gandhi Jee, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learnt from my mother and father. This is what my soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone.”

And we can’t even stand someone saying “Merry Christmas” to us.

I won’t go as far as to say there’s a War on Christmas.  Not with every storefront and advertisement showcasing the holiday, but it’s disconcerting that the stand has been made at saying “Merry Christmas,” stopping the festivities of the holiday short at the point of an actual human interaction and connection, which is what Christmas is really all about.  And in the holiday season, that meaning is singular to Christmas.  

While the other holidays of the season are joyful celebrations, they’re not inherent celebrations of joy itself.  Kwanzaa is a celebration of the African heritage and culture.  Hannukah, a commemoration of a people’s victory over oppression and a miracle that told them they weren’t alone in their darkest days.  But Christmas is a celebration of the man who lived for peace and love for mankind.  It’s about joy and goodwill for all.  Are we so cynical, so angry that we can’t hear that message unless it’s delivered in the exact way we want to hear it?  Do we have to get so disgusted that someone would wish us well while daring to invoke God in the process?  Is this an appropriate response to well-wishes: “How dare they try to put their religion on me.  If they knew me, they wouldn’t be wishing me a Merry Christmas.”  Because maybe that’s the point.  If they knew us, maybe they wouldn’t want to wish merriment upon us.

All year, everyday, complete strangers pass through our lives.  We sit next to them on the train.  We let them pass in a tight hallway.  We hold a door.  We just make simple accidental eye contact on the street.  But how often do we wish someone joy or goodwill, or anything?  How often do we want to?  We don’t know these people.  What if she leaves her phone on during movies and ruins the show for everyone?  What if he drives along the shoulder to bypass traffic and then cuts off everyone who respectfully waited?  What if she smokes right by the entrance and blows smoke in everyone’s face before throwing her finished butt on the ground, making her garbage someone else’s problem?  What if he hits his kids?  What if they’re just bad at heart and will return any overture of goodwill and humanity with animosity and disgust? Simply, what if they don't deserve it?

I wish it were easier to be more forgiving.  To overlook cracks in morality.  To be able to say to a Talib who shoots up a school, “I know it’s not your fault.  I know you just do what you do because you’ve been kept in the dark in order to be manipulated and used as a pawn to carry out evil.”  But that’s not the world we live in.  The existence of that evil poses a very real physical and symbolic threat to the way of life we want to lead.  Allowing that evil to exist inspires more evil that combats the good forgiving it inspires.  It undermines the best of us.  And so we have to be vigilant.  While aspiring to reach the example set by Nobel Laureates, we still have to keep our guard up.  And it’s exhausting.  

No one wants to fight the good fight.  They fight because they have to.  But it gets hard to keep getting back up when you’re knocked down so often.  So can’t we just give ourselves a break, even if only for a short time?  Can’t we just be allowed to assume the best of everyone and have our temporary, unconditional love for mankind rewarded with a smile?  A “Thank you?” The warm feeling that we can actually get to that good place, instead of getting a sneer and a lump of coal in our stomach that tells us humanity is doomed?  Can’t we even just pretend for a little while that we’re already there?  That there’s hope for humanity and the battle isn’t fruitless?  

So with that in mind: to the Jewish people, I wish you a Happy Hannukah.  To the Africans of the world, a Happy Kwanzaa.  And to everyone, a Merry Christmas…  And a Happy Mulalamas.

Second Star to the Right

Last Thursday night, NBC aired a live production of Peter Pan.  Eight hours later, NASA launched the Orion spacecraft.  The precursor to the first manned flight to Mars, getting us closer to that second star to the right than ever before.  That can’t be a coincidence.

The Orion constellation gets its name from the legendary Greek hunter and demigod son of Poseidon, but the constellation has been a focus of religions around the the world since we first looked up and pondered the depths of our mind and space.  Pyramids in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan (Place of the Gods) and the Giza Pyramids in Egypt were erected to align with the stars known as Orion’s Belt, and the constellation is also referenced multiple times in the Judeo-Christian Bible with the Hebrew word “Kesil,” which means “fool.”  That comes from the root “Kesel” (which is, also likely not coincidentally, the root for the Hebrew month of Kislev, which we are now in), meaning “hope.”

Fool and hope...  I like those.  It must take a little of both to pull off something amazing like landing a man on Mars.  Just look at what it took to get a man on the Moon.

From the time the first person dreamed of stepping foot on the Moon, to the first flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, to the formation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915, which paved the way for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to open shop in 1958, all the way through the space wars of the late 1950s and 1960s and the ultimate Moon landing, a lot of foolish hope must have been mustered to push on.  There were countless setbacks.  Millions of dollars spent.  Dozens of missions failed.  Four Pioneer space probes destroyed.  Eleven American lives tragically lost during testing and training.  But then, on July 16, 1969, at 9:32 AM, EDT, the rockets of Apollo 11 cleared the tower of the Kennedy Space Center.  

At 9:44, the craft enters into Earth’s orbit.  On July 19th, the Moon’s.  

July 20th, Lance Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin begin their descent to the Moon’s surface aboard the lunar module Eagle.  At 4:18 EDT, the first manned spacecraft touches down on the Moon.  

And on July 21, 1969, at 10:56 EDT, Neil Armstrong, with one small step, takes a giant leap and sets the first footprint down on the surface of the Moon.

We’ve taken a lot of steps since then.  We’ve built an international space station.  We landed on Mars.  On a comet.  We have spacecrafts charting the farthest reaches of the universe and giving us glimpses of planets that have never even been seen by the naked eye.  We have gone further than those first stargazers could have ever thought possible.  But in a lot of other ways, we haven’t gone anywhere at all.  

As it was in the 1960s, during the race for space, we find ourselves in a tense stand-off with Russia, which has started gobbling back up land that hasn’t been under its control since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The threat of nuclear war has only multiplied and continues to grow with every spin of a centrifuge in Iran.  The Middle East is still fractured and threatening to explode.  We still find ourselves mired in a war on a foreign land which we can’t escape from.  Race relations in America are returning to a boiling pitch and Washington’s streets are once again feeling the pounding of angry and disillusioned marchers.  And in some ways, things have gotten even worse.  Islamist extremism and climate change pose real or imagined threats to our world on an existential level.  At times, it gets difficult to believe things will ever get better.

But we can’t give up.  We need to hold onto the foolish hope that we can change things.  That we can make them better.  Even when all rational thought and evidence is pointing us to the contrary, we have to believe it can get better.  Because sometimes, just believing in something strongly enough is all you need to give it life.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

In the name of Michael Brown, in the name of Eric Garner and in the name of racial equality, protesters the world over have taken to the streets.  In New York, protesters cornered the busiest island in the country, shutting down highways in Manhattan from east to west and bridges from north to south, and along the way, they also shut down Lincoln Tunnel, named for the man who ended the Civil War and slavery in our country.  That symbolism may not seem like much, and it may have been lost on most of the protesters, but when you have the attention of the whole world, every little thing matters.  In fact, even when no one seems to be paying attention, everything matters. Or else nothing matters.

That is one of the most unfortunate sentiments to come out of all this.  There is a whole swath of people who feel less than because they are, sometimes literally, put under the foot of the police for no reason other than being of a certain color.  And to exacerbate the matter, they then see that behavior ignored.  No one should feel like they don’t matter.  It’s a serious issue.  The problem now is, the black and minority communities have chosen to use the case in Ferguson as their rallying cry.  A case where the black man was in the wrong and brought the unfortunate run-in with the police on himself.  Did he bring the fateful gunshots on himself?  That will likely be an issue disputed to the ends of time, but there is no question that he robbed a store and invited the police to come for him, making the encounter justified.  And when that is the poster case for the movement, it makes it easier to, from afar, disregard the very real and earned cries as unfounded.

On the other side, the black and minority communities claim there is a systemic problem within the police force.  But if that were true, how could any self-respecting black person or minority join the force?  And they do.  As of 2010, more than half of the NYPD was made up of minorities.  The truth is, police officers are under a lot of stress, especially in minority communities.  Why is there more crime in minority communities?  An important question.  One that matters in the larger scale of things, but does not pertain to this conversation.  It is not for the police to ponder why it is, but to handle the situation as it is.  Our police aren’t there to consider socio-economic issues but to simply protect and serve.  And having to protect a neighborhood when in the back of your mind is the thought that the neighborhood whose protection has been entrusted to you can also be the source of your demise can not only make one jumpy in the name of self-preservation, it could also embitter a person.  Having to say goodbye to your loved ones every morning because of the very real possibility that it could be the last time you do could change a person.  Does that give them the right to harass and harm innocent men, women and children?  Absolutely not.  In fact, all that does is take a little innocence from the world, darkening their streets a little more, only creating more shadows to jump at.

Ultimately, both sides are justifiably upset and in a way both at fault.  Now the grievances have been aired, the lines have been drawn and the stage is set.  So where do we go from here?  We come together.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  President Lincoln said that, and it has never been questioned or doubted.  Our house is divided.  Now how do we close the gap? We learn to accept that there aren’t two sides in this struggle.  When one side hurts the other, it only hurts us all.  The relentless cycle of hate, violence and distrust pulls us all into a cyclone of pain.  Once we force ourselves to see things from the other’s perspective, hopefully we can then understand each other and learn something.  We can see that behind the shield there is a human being and the last thing they want is to encounter trouble.  We can understand that beneath every color of skin there is just flesh and blood; when it’s kicked it bruises, when it’s pricked and shot it bleeds, and when its spirit is beaten down they sink into the darkness that breeds the enemy no one wants them to be. And the people on both sides that can hear that and absorb it are not the problem.  The ones who do not are.  And that’s the other half of this story.

The house is divided, and on both sides of the divide there is a seedy basement.  There are bad men and women on both sides of this who don’t care about the rest of us, and this idea of “protecting our own” is tearing down our house from its foundation.  That’s why it’s so important for those on the up-and-up to come together and root out these bottom-dwellers.  The guilty among us who don’t care that their selfish acts bring undue suspicion on the innocent around them, and the ones who aren’t in danger of becoming embittered but start off that way and don’t care who they’re kicking as long as they can kick someone down with an expected power of impunity, and who turn badges into targets; that is where the problem lies.  That is who we have to unite against.  Not as a community or as a culture, not as a squad or a force, but as a race of human beings.  We all need to be able to come together, police and the community they protect and serve, and shine a light on the ones who aren’t looking out for anyone other than themselves and rid ourselves of that stain so the best and finest of us can then come out into the light of a new day.

But I’m getting ahead of us.  That’s the long road.  First, we just need to take a first step.  For now, instead of just walking or marching by each other with veiled or open disdain, how about we do something positive.  We can start small.  Shake a hand.  Make a connection. Instead of shutting a bridge down, build one.  A handshake might not seem like much, like it can’t accomplish much, but it matters.  Everything does.