Flames of Hope

Sorry this blog hasn't been updated in a week, but I've been ill or busy lately, and some days I couldn't even get to the computer.

I've often commented that living in Murfreesboro through this whole mosque crisis has felt like living in Nazi German prior to World War II, or watching the American Civil Rights movement back in the 1950s and 1960s. The only good thing that comes from these realizations is another realization: neither group of bigots stopped the world from moving on. Granted, they caused a great amount of death and strife before they were finished, but in the end they were finished. Other than a few blow-hard stragglers that most people don't take seriously, or are looked down on and opposed by those who do take them seriously, both the Nazis and the KKK are considered movements of the past, when people didn't think as much as they do now. Now if the stragglers would just figure out that they are wrong, life would be much  better.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks that way, and I'd like to quote a really wonderful article by Gail Kerr as published in the Tennessean Newspaper:

Burning at Murfreesboro mosque site will be motivator for truth

It didn't work then. And it won't work now.

The coward or cowards who set fire to construction equipment at an Islamic mosque construction site in Murfreesboro over the weekend are just like the racists who dynamited the home of the late Z. Alexander Looby.

Looby was an African-American attorney who filed the lawsuit to desegregate Nashville's public school system. He also represented the students who were arrested after the downtown lunch counter sit-ins.

As a result, segregationists threw a bomb through the window of his home just off Jefferson Street on the morning of April 19, 1960. No one was home, thank God. But instead of intimidating civil rights activists, it motivated them. More than 3,000 people marched to the Nashville courthouse and confronted Mayor Ben West, who agreed on the spot to end segregation at the lunch counters.

 I believe a similar thing will happen now.

When you shine the light of truth and logic on nut jobs who torch stuff under cover of darkness, they are shown to be what they are: Scurrying cockroaches.

The mosque site arsonists join the 1960 bombers and the KKK hiding behind white sheets: They never let facts get in the way of their own stupidity.

And here is the main fact: All Muslims are not terrorists. All terrorists are not Muslim.

To believe anything else is a demonstration of utter ignorance at best, and the worst sort of xenophobia at worst.

Are all African-Americans members of gangs? That's utterly absurd. Does every immigrant come to America intent on robbing and killing? Of course not. Do all persons who label themselves Christians live a Christ-like life? No way. Witness how some "Christians" have reacted to construction of this mosque.

This ongoing nonsense is fed by anonymous fools on the Internet and talk radio that makes a profit feeding on the worst in people.

I'll never understand why some people are so obnoxiously afraid of anyone who looks, talks or believes differently than they do. The growing Muslim community simply wants a place to pray, congregate and learn. 

Just like the Protestant church I attend.

The national headlines were cringe-worthy: A mosque construction site got torched in the buckle of the Bible belt.

I hope they catch the arsonists. I hope they spend many long nights locked in a miserably uncomfortable jail cell.

Most of all, I hope that thinking people — including those who seek our votes, and those who preach from our pulpits — will be inspired by what happened to stand up and fearlessly speak the truth. Because enough is enough.

People who worship and believe differently than you or I do deserve respect. Not hatred.

A crowd gathered Monday night in Rutherford County, lighting candles to show support of their Muslim neighbors.

The candles burned far brighter than an arsonist's torch ever will.

This land was made for you and me

Yesterday afternoon shots were fired around the site of the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro while members and reporters were looking over the destruction from the weekend's arson. The group I belong to, Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom is having a candlelight vigil at the courthouse in town tonight in protest of these terrorist acts. Since I'm still contagious from my chicken pox, I can't go, so I'm making a suggestion that anyone who believes in religious freedom (including freedom from religion) and thinks that terrorist acts should not be acceptable against any religion should change their profile pictures on Facebook to that of a candle.

Even as I write this, the vigil is going on, people from all walks of life, all religions, all politics are gathering together to say enough is enough. I'm not a person who watches a whole lot of TV, but when I flicked on my little flatscreen next to my desk this evening, I was interested to find that the programming on the Biography channel tonight is almost exclusively about racism and bigotry in the United States. The show that went off an hour ago was about how teens are brainwashed into joining the skinheads, the one I'm watching now is about the history of the KKK. Listening to the hate mongering is sickening, but at the same time somewhat revealing; it's amazing how many of the sentiments I had hoped were gone for good have been quoted at me lately.


Probably the most interesting, and perhaps most galling, thing I have been accused of is being un-American. Several times over that accusation has been flung at me, in any form from not standing firm enough behind the armed forces, to the more pointed directions to go back to where I came from. To both of these I am trying to decide whether to grit my teeth and growl at the hate, or smile at how ridiculous it is.  Go back to where I came from? Alright, so should I go back to the military base in southern California where I was born? Wait... did I just say military base? That's right, not only was I born in America to Americans, I was born on a military base, the biological daughter of a Marine (let's add to the fact that both my biological parents had just-off-the-rez Native American grandparents, and... yeah, there's really no where for me to go). Not only was my birth father a Marine, but my adopted father was a Korean veteran, only sent home when his brother was killed there. In fact, should I like to visit what is left of my dad, I have to go to Middle Tennessee Veteran's Cemetery. His father, my grandfather, fought in World War I, even though it meant he had to fudge his age and change his name because he was too young. There hasn't been a generation of my family that hasn't fought for America in the century both immigrant portions have been here, and those that didn't fight built planes, sent care packages, and dealt with the shortages caused by war. The only time I've ever seen one of my cousins was when his submarine docked in San Diego and he had leave to eat dinner at our house. When I was younger, before I ruined my knee and became so sick that life became almost unbearable, I wanted nothing more than to join the Air Force just like my Papa. So don't say I'm un-American; if being American is determined by how much you love the armed forces, there are few who are more American than me.

People may say I'm un-American, but in my opinion there is nothing more un-American than trying to subvert the Constitution, to change laws that should not be changed just because they don't like how a person looks, or who they love, or in what way they worship. We are America, all of us, be we white, black, brown, red, yellow, striped, polka-dot or paisley. We are America, be we straight, gay, bisexual, asexual, or what have you. We are America, no matter we worship Jehovah, G-d, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, Kerridwen, Danu, Aakuluujjusi, the Holy Crow, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or no one at all. We are America, the many colors, the many flavors, sounds, scents and feelings. We are America.

This land is your land, this land is my land, this land is our land.

This land was made for you and me.

In memory of my dad, James E. Butts Sr., USAF

1 April 1932 - 9 March 2010

“The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon.” - George Washington
“Where liberty is, there is my country.” - Benjamin Franklin

There will be hope...

And after the darkness must always come the sun.

I don't know how I ever got to sleep last night, my chest so tight with anger I could barely breathe, my thoughts racing at a thousand miles an hour. When I finally did sleep, my dreams were haunted by flames, by charred corpses covered with a film of ash as fine as new fallen snow. At points I'd swear I could hear demons laughing beneath my bed, happy that once again they were being set rampant by men's anger. When I finally woke, I was even more tired than when I lay down, my tongue heavy with the foul taste of death, my throat on fire as it would be had I spent the entire night screaming.

At last, still exhausted, still remembering my dreams and the laughter of the demons, I gingerly went to my computer and flicked it on, worried about what new horrors today might bring, only to be surprised by a glimmer among fear and anger, something as small and pure as a white rose forcing its self to the sky through the ruins of a world destroyed: I found hope.

Fire is a heartless killer, cold despite the flames; it devours anything it touches, no caring whether what it destroys thinks or feels, hope or dreams, or is simply there, along the path it wants to follow. An uncontrolled fire can destroy everything, only to leave you looking at the ashes, trying to remember what life was like before it removed your whole world. But this Murfreesboro fire hasn't just destroyed, it has kindled a spark that may purify, not consume.

I don't cry over many things that other people do, anger is my usual response, anger at stupidity, at intolerance, at the sheer destructive closing of minds that other people can live with. I don't think I'll ever understand any of that; much as I try, it never makes sense to me how people can be so willfully ignorant. Moved to tears, I was however, when someone who up till now had spoken against freedom of religion, all to willing to condemn the many for the sins of the few, spoke out before me, my friends, and the world at large to admit they were wrong.

Like most other humans, I hate being proved wrong. I'm not as bad as some other people I know when it comes to making up excuses about why I'm not wrong, or pointing out minuscule imperfections in a hypothesis to prove why my ideas are correct, but it still sticks in my throat when I have to admit I'm wrong, and my stomach flips in on its self when I go to ask for forgiveness. This person had more strength than I can ever imagine to step up and say they were wrong, to say that they have left behind the friends who thought the way they used to, and that now they will do what they can to make sure the truth is spread, rather than the lie.

Right now, this person is my hero.

And so while my chest is still tight with anger from yesterday, I'm not as angry as I was, and I'm not afraid. Over and over again I have seen the people I am lucky enough to call friends denounce hatred, to remind us all that condemning the many because of the destructive actions of the few doesn't make us any better than those we despise. It's so easy to hate, to lift your fist to the sky and swear vengeance for the wrongs done to you. Far harder is it to forgive, to admit when you are wrong.

Today, someone became my hero for admitting they were wrong to spread hate instead of love. May tomorrow hold many more heroes that bring tears to my eyes.

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.