Talk about unfortunate timing.
We last published The Reflector on April 23, so for 123 days, I haven’t had a chance to weigh in on what’s going on in the world and set people straight.
Wasting no time in her four-month respite from my commentary, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed a new immigration bill into law that same day which allows police to demand to see identification or paperwork from any suspected illegal immigrant and directs them to arrest those who cannot prove they aren’t.
Why give cops the open invitation to racially profile and hassle Hispanics? How do we define legitimate “suspicion” anyway? How often would legal immigrants and Hispanic citizens have to constantly prove their legality? The law even compels private citizens to sue agencies they believe aren’t obeying the law even if those private citizens have no connection to the agency or immigration!
Unfortunately, The Reflector was on summer hiatus at the time, and I didn’t get the chance to weigh in. By now, the topic is old news and too stale to go any further on.
Then all throughout the summer, America’s “chickens came home to roost” as the largest marine oil spill in history ravaged the Gulf Coast. My reaction was simple: it’s the result of our nation’s addiction to oil. Sure, BP was negligent, but if it hadn’t been BP, it would have been someone else. And if we don’t start investing seriously in alternative sources of energy and cure our addiction, it will happen again.
And that’s not all. It seemed like every week something new came up that I would have loved to chime in on. Over 90,000 pages of secret military documents with details on the War in Afghanistan were leaked! California’s Supreme Court overturned a ban on gay marriage! Utah State has the dumbest Athletic Director in the country! (Or did Georgia?) And through all of these, I didn’t get the chance to discuss these items in this newspaper.
And then there was that absurd controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York City, where people got all up-in-arms over an Islamic community center (essentially a Muslim version of a YMCA) and mosque being built on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center.
Somehow the Tea Partiers re-branded this community center into an “Islamic Victory Mosque.” Do Tea Partiers get some kind of excitement off being willfully ignorant? We’ve all had nine years to be constantly reminded that the 9/11 planners and hijackers belonged to an offshoot extremist group that has little in common with mainstream Islam. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge this is intentionally ignoring facts.
If that’s not enough, they tried to paint Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim imam behind the community center, as some kind of extremist anti-American with terrorist ties, when most sources from the right and left have shown he’s actually quite moderate and has advocated women’s equality and opposed hard line Islamic law. Facts have never been one of the Tea Party Movement’s strong suits.
So much for the community center being a place of healing and interfaith dialogue. But this is all old news – wait, people are still upset over it? People are protesting this? Sure enough, months later, people are still having daily protests and the Fox News spin machine won’t let this go.
And it’s not just mosques in New York City that rile people up. People seem to have an irrational fear of Islam anywhere. Just last week on the official Mississippi State University Facebook page, students were invited to visit the local mosque as a part of the Maroon Edition, a program in which first-year students read the book Three Cups of Tea, the story of mountain climber Greg Mortenson’s mission to build schools for girls in rural poor areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sounds reasonable. An optional trip to a mosque so people reading the book could get some perspective on Islam. Plus, learning something about another culture never hurt anyone, right?
Apparently not. I’ve never been more ashamed of my Bulldog brethren than when reading the comments to the post, telling of how we are a “disgrace to our nation” and even posts from alumni threatening to withdraw their support.
Come on, Bulldogs. We’re better than all those idiots up north. Let’s defy stereotypes, be a little more open-minded and not embarrass ourselves on our own Facebook page.
Harry Nelson is the managing editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].