My alarm went off at 6:30am on September 11th, 2001. As I was walking out to the breakfast table, by father informed me that terorists had just attacked the World Trade Center. Driving to school that morning, I listened to the radio stations report on the events occuring on the East Coast. DJs spoke of patriotism and played the National Anthem and I was proud to be an American. Then, the next morning, the news began reporting on the Anti-Arab and Muslim backlash occuring across the country. Suddenly, I was not so proud to be an American anymore.
Back when I was in high school, a history teacher of Japanese decent spoke to our class about the time he had spent as a young child in an Internment camp after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Listening to him relate all that his family and he had to endure at the hands of our government, I could at least gain a little solace from the fact that something like that could never happen in our present time. But now it is.
Arab and Muslim citizens all over our country are being accosted in the workplace and assaulted in the streets, treated as our enemies rather than as our contemporaries. Simply because they happen to share the same nationality as the terrorists who attacked us, people who have lived in the United States all their lives are now being treated as foreign invaders. And this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened.
Patriotic though we may be, we must admit that this country has a long history of persecuting its citizens: Native-Americans, African-Americans, Japanese-Americans. We are raised to believe that our country is based on freedom and equality, but our ancestors – as well as us – have often demonstrated that we believe that freedom and equality as belonging only to a CERTAIN group. We lash out at those we consider to not be “true Americans,” when the truth is, very few of us are TRULY Americans. The only TRUE Americans are the Native-Americans, and we showed our patriotism to them by pushing them off their land and forcing our religions upon them.
People are driving around with flags attached to their cars; men are getting tattoos of the Statue of Liberty on their arms; college students are crowding the military recruiting offices. It’s one thing to do these things in order to prove we’re Americans – it’s quite another thing to actually ACT like Americans. Carrying flags and singing patriotic songs mean nothing, if at the some time we’re espousing our unity, we’re using that same unity to tear apart a segment of our society. Believing all Arabs and Muslims are terrorists makes us no better than the terrorists who belived that all Americans deserved to die. Lumping together a group of people based on nationality – ANY nationality – is bigotry, plain and simple. There is no middle ground here.
There are also those “Americans” who feel that since they’re not actively harassing Arabs and Muslims, they’re not part of the problem. But isn’t it just as wicked to sit back and watch evil happen and do nothing to stop it, as it is to commit that evil yourself? Evil DOES thrive when good people do nothing.
Where I work, there’s a plaque on the wall that I see every day. I’ve read it dozens of times, but I’ve never truly let the words sink in. Then, a few days after the terrorist attacks, I took a good, long look at what the plaque had to say: “They came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up – because I wasn’t a Jew … They came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up – because I wasn’t a trade unionist. They came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up – because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me – and by that time there was no one left to speak up. – Pastor Martin Niemoeller (Nazi Victim)”. If we don’t speak up now to stop this anti-Arab and Muslim backlash, then when we finally get around to it, it might just be too late.
The truth is, we’re not just the red, white and blue anymore. We’re also the BLACK and blue. We’re a wounded country, and will be for a long time to come. But through that pain and anguish can also come great healing and redemption.
Historians are calling September 11th, 2001, “the next Pearl Harbor, the day that will live in infamy.” What occurred that Tuesday morning will truly prove to be the defining moment of our generation, and we can either let it be our destruction, or our salvation. The choice is ours and ours alone. And we must choose wisely.
Chimene Mata
