Going from "they" to "we"

I was a child when the United States invaded Iraq for the first time. Since I was pretty typical boy, I spent hours in the woods near my house, playing "soldier." My friends and I shot at imaginary Iraqis with our imaginary guns. We always won. 


One time, though, one of my friends fell backward, saying, "They got me!" 


Alone in my room that night, I thought about how sad it would be if my friend had actually been shot. I pictured his mother crying. 


Then I thought about the pretend Iraqis we'd been shooting. I realized that they, too, had mothers who would cry if they were shot. 


I lost my interest in playing "soldier."


****


It's obvious and easy to condemn the latest batch of bigotry spewing forth from those trying to prevent Muslims in Murfreesboro from exercising their First Amendment right to worship. Bob Smietana's  story in the Tennessean speaks for itself:

Currently one Muslim student at Central Magnet School in Murfreesboro is allowed to pray in an empty room during lunch, said James Evans, spokesman for Rutherford County Schools. 

Evans pointed out that Christian students hold a lunch Bible study at the same school and that a Christian club there called First Priority has several hundred members. 

[Pete] Doughtie said Muslim students should assimilate to Christian culture. Rather than allowing Muslim students to pray, he’d rather see all students take part in a Christian prayer each day at school.

“We have been a strong Christian country, and if we don’t get back to it, the whole face of this nation is going to change,” Doughtie said.

Doughtie, a 71-year-old retiree who publishes a small newspaper featuring right-wing views, is featured heavily the article. I hope the idea in giving him such a prominent platform is to give a human face to the opposition.  In a typical article, the idea is for us to empathize with him. In this case, though, the statements attributed to Doughtie (and the other major subject of the article, Rev. Darrel Whaley) seem to function the same way a freak show does at a carnival. We readers get to observe and note that, whatever our shortcomings, at least we're not that.


In an odd way, even Whaley seems to exhibit some level of self-awareness on how repugnant his views are:

An evangelical Christian pastor, Whaley believes Muslims will go to hell if they don’t leave their faith and become Christians. 

He says that he’s not a bigot and doesn’t hate Muslims. 

But he can’t stand their religion and will do whatever he can to limit the spread of Islam in Rutherford County and in the United States. 

“We are not against Muslims praying in a mosque,” Whaley said. “We are against Islam.”

It's a relief to know he doesn't hate them for practicing their religion. He's just hates their religion, period.


But as I said, it's easy to condemn. It's much harder to do what they're refusing to do -- extend empathy and compassion.


So let's first try to understand why they reject empathy and compassion:

Doughtie also worries about a so-called “stealth jihad.”

He learned that term from a book by the same name by author Robert Spencer, who runs a blog called Jihad Watch. The book says that Muslims want to undermine America from within. 

Since at least 2009, that claim has been repeated by local activists meeting in churches and community groups in Middle Tennessee. 

Those meetings have regularly featured anti-Islam speakers and authors like Spencer, Brigitte Gabriel of Act for America, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and Bill French, a former Tennessee State University professor who goes by the pseudonym Bill Warner. 

They’ve persuaded activists like Doughtie to see almost every action by Muslims with suspicion.

Fear is a black hole sort of feeling, feeding on itself until it infects everything one perceives. It destroys reason, logic, compassion, and empathy. One sees everything "with suspicion." Fear lives off its cousins: lies and ignorance.


Doughtie and Whaley fear Muslims because they've been fed lies by people who profit off demagoguing against Muslims. They've failed to truly educate themselves, to seek out views balancing the poison of people like Frank Gaffney. 


I don't know why they've been satisfied with this fear. Perhaps it offers some sort of cold comfort, a sense of place in our ever-more integrated and diverse world. Many don't feel safe until they've divided the world into "us" and "them."


Whatever the cause, fear tears at the soul. It destroys lives and communities. The object of their fear will return the same to them. 


The only way out of this cycle of fear is to practice its opposite. The most revealing statement in the entire article is this:

Until the new Islamic Center was approved in 2010, “I didn’t know that there were any Muslims in this community,” said Pete Doughtie, owner of the Rutherford Reader, a local free newspaper.

Doughtie simply didn't know his neighbors. His ignorance turned to intolerance when he started relying on outside hatemongers like Gaffney for information rather than engaging with his fellow citizens of Murfreesboro.


It's a telling that our communities can be so diverse, yet we can so easily wall ourselves off from each other. If I didn't work as a public school teacher, I wouldn't know many Muslim families. I wouldn't know that their values are the same as our values, that their community is a part of our community.


If it weren't for my job, I wouldn't know that there is no "they" and "them." There is, in this community, only "we" and "us."


Pete Doughtie, Darrel Whaley, Wilson Boyd, Muslim families, all of Middle Tennessee -- we -- are all in this together, but there's a rift in our community. For us to find a way out of it, we're going to have to do the opposite of what fear tells us: take a risk and truly become neighbors.


For me, that will be hard. For me, the "they" is Doughtie and Whaley. 


How do we acknowledge the humanity of those who don't acknowledge the humanity of others?