City on Fire

When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me about the different colored leaves that appear in the fall along the eastern half of the United States. We didn't have that where I grew up; the weather didn't change much between the seasons, and the trees there stayed green year-round, be they the wide former Christmas tree grown out over two decades in my back yard, or the tall eucalyptus that grew in troves along side the main streets and down by the mall, reminders of an age past when the people of my hometown were those who lived by get-rich-quick, instead of those who already had money and stability.

I was no longer a child the first time I saw the changing of the colors, driving back from the university in a new hometown in the middle of Tennessee. Taking the back way home along the river, the southern hills rose before me in shades of gold and ruby, the leaves of the trees beside the two-lane country road bright orange in the afternoon sun, the ivy crawling up their trunks a bright crimson. I felt like I was driving through a tunnel of fire, almost ready to drive into the river to cool off. Across the country and around the world, I don't think I've ever seen anything that beautiful.

No one could have told me that six years later, Murfreesboro would be a city on fire.

This time, it isn't the trees that cause the flames to dance around me, it's human bigotry, and human greed, augmented by very human people who believe that they alone know who God is, and they alone can judge the worthiness of others to receive the freedoms guaranteed by the law.

The signs were there before now, the hints of the coals not banked over the years, just waiting for the right tinder to burst into an inferno: a building on the ground of the university named for the founder of the Ku Klux Klan; a car honking in tune to "Dixie" when it drives past the Stone's River cemetery, almost taunting the ghosts of the boys in blue whose bones lay encamped in the dirt; conversations where anyone who didn't agree with the local religious tun being castigated and consigned to hell; the unsubtle comments about those who didn't fit the WASP mold.

The signs were all there, and yet I feel like I was blind. Maybe the whole city was blind, the whole county. No one ever expected Murfreesboro to rage into flame.

And what could cause such a fire, that it would spread through this sleepy little southern town full of Antebellum building with the wires on the outside, letting you know their age by the lack of modernity? Matches are such small things, the flames they produce so weak that one can put it out with a breath. But now I'm wondering if there will be breath to put out this fire. What could cause Murfreesboro to combust?

All it would take was for a religious center to want to expand.

The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro sits on a dingy corner a few blocks from the center of town, squashed behind another shop, not far from the Paulo factory, a thousand people trying to cram into a space not much bigger than the Subway one street over. They purchased a vacant lot, made plans for a larger mosque, a swimming pool, classroom for the kids, and a small cemetery. What little money they had would go to the mosque first, everything else would come later. Compared to some of the churches in town, it's going to be a speck of nothing. Something different to my family's joke of "house... house... house... church!" when we passed on by.

People complained, called names, threatened. Several more stood up, said yes, opened our arms. Some care about religion, some don't, more important to us is freedom, the freedom we are granted as Americans. The freedom my uncle died for in Korea, the freedom every generation of my family has sent someone to fight for. Maybe it was too obvious to realize we were the only ones not lying when we said it wasn't about religion, it was about freedom.

Names I can handle, threats I can handle. Joke about the names, call the cops and record the threats. Words have always been my weapon of choice, and rare is the time I run out of ammunition. Part of me always feared what would happen, but I never realized how angry it would make me.

This morning, before the dawn, a false sun lit the sky. The machines used for clearing where the new mosque will be built were doused with gasoline and set ablaze. This morning, when I read what had happened, my hands shook with anger, my chest tightened with rage. Rage, and fear. No matter what happens, I won't ever forget today, forget the day the spark became a flame.

Please, oh please, don't let it be too late to stop Murfreesboro burning.