Ground zero and the mosque
Fond liberals may hope that the march of the world is generally, with frequent particular setbacks, heading for a brighter, more tolerant future; however, I doubt whether this is so. There are periods when certain forces come together that make for balance and tolerance, that allow people, generally and for a time, to be their better selves, only for counter-vailing forces to pick (or shatter) this settlement apart. Nor are the flows uniform so in the same week that we have Californian judges striking down Proposition 8, we have a gathering ugliness against immigrants in Arizona and Muslims in New York (and elsewhere). The world is impermanent, as the Buddha surmised, and values participate in this ebb and flow as much as anything.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/14/barack-obama-ground-zero-mosque
What I found most disheartening in this piece is both the making of it politics, already polarised ugliness as it is in the US, but the assumption that this is an act of provocation, could it not also be an act of reconciliation - a mosque that served the community in the widest sense? I think of the German charity that, after the war, opened shop in the precincts of Coventry Cathedral (destroyed by German bombing) so that young Germans could be placed in community groups around the country helping communities that had been so affected by Nazi aggression. This was not an acknowledgement of collective guilt but a desire to show people the best part of a country, to witness to the best values the country had to offer. The mosque could easily do likewise: show people the 'true face' of Islam when it meets its highest aspirations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/14/barack-obama-ground-zero-mosque
What I found most disheartening in this piece is both the making of it politics, already polarised ugliness as it is in the US, but the assumption that this is an act of provocation, could it not also be an act of reconciliation - a mosque that served the community in the widest sense? I think of the German charity that, after the war, opened shop in the precincts of Coventry Cathedral (destroyed by German bombing) so that young Germans could be placed in community groups around the country helping communities that had been so affected by Nazi aggression. This was not an acknowledgement of collective guilt but a desire to show people the best part of a country, to witness to the best values the country had to offer. The mosque could easily do likewise: show people the 'true face' of Islam when it meets its highest aspirations.