"This book will kill me."
The title of this entry is a quote from Marlen, a student in my grammar class last semester, who uttered it after I observed that the fire safety lesson in our textbook asked students to point out the CO2 detector in a picture. While I'm sure that excessive plant growth - or perhaps the growth of an alien plant with a taste for human flesh and aspirations of world conquest - would be quite hazardous to a homeowner's health, carbon monoxide would present much more of a threat than carbon dioxide in the event of a fire, and there was even an alarm designed to detect it in the picture. I'm not sure if the editors got a little overzealous when adding subscripts, but if any of my Level 2 grammar students perish from carbon monoxide poisoning, at least I know it won't be a consequence of misinformation in my class.
This week has been a very tiring one. I just finished my third week of a summer grammar class and my second week of a summer PLA class, in both of which I have small but dedicated groups of students. After getting a phone call from my supervisor on Monday afternoon, I also picked up an evening class that started on Tuesday and meets three nights a week. I was equally unhappy about the short notice and the split schedule and came very close to telling my supervisor to find someone else to teach the class, but my damnable sense of responsibility kicked in and I agreed to it. I figure that being a full-time instructor (until the end of the month, at least) means that I need to be willing to do more than what would be required of an adjunct, and I especially dislike the thought of leaving a class without a capable, passionate instructor to teach it. However, I've made it clear to my supervisor that I don't want to do this again if it can be avoided - being both a morning person and a night person puts a real damper on my social life, and makes it even harder for me to maintain a consistent sleep schedule. Thankfully, the students in my night class are very engaged and creative, and we have a lot of fun together. One of them is a Brazilian au pair who's interested in the nuances of English and different ways of expressing similar ideas; she often brings up grammatical constructs that will appear in later units and asks if they could be applied to the examples at hand, which means that we won't be progressing through the textbook in a strictly linear fashion. How refreshing!
That aside, I don't want to regale my dear readers with tales of my week at work when far more important events have been unfolding elsewhere in the nation. I've been doing some thinking and listening to a lot of radio reports about the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last Sunday, and I want to share some of the things that have been on my mind. Disagreement and/or discussion are both welcome.
Predictably, factions emerged and fingers began pointing before Omar Mateen's gun had even cooled. Some blamed Muslims, some blamed homosexuals, some blamed firearms, and some blamed American culture. Some, in an appalling display of insensitivity, took to Twitter to say the victims reaped what they sowed or proclaim that the Islamic State was behind the shooting and congratulate a xenophobic, narcissistic demagogue and pathological liar for correctly predicting a terrorist attack. All sides made a lot of assumptions, and none of them were entirely accurate.
To be fair, it's hard to definitively classify this shooting as either a terrorist attack or a hate crime, especially as those close to the gunman have spoken up and new information about him has emerged. Yes, he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State before the attack, but he also had strong homosexual tendencies. His father Seddique Mir Mateen said shortly after the attack that religion had nothing to do with it, subsequently saying that it's up to God to punish gays and he would have personally arrested his son if he'd known about his plans ahead of time. Some might read the elder Mateen's statements as weak attempts to exonerate either Islam or himself from being blamed for his son's heinous crime; I would encourage those who think so to look at the responses of the larger Muslim community, which has called for overwhelming love and condemned the gunman's actions as antithetical to the core teachings of Islam (to which the Islamic State absolutely does not subscribe).
No, dear readers, I do not blame Islam itself for this shooting. While it's true that mainstream Islam does not condone non-heteronormative behavior, evidence suggests that differing religious views were not the motive for the shooting, or at least not the primary one. Had the gunman wanted to make an ideological statement, he could have targeted a church, a synagogue, a temple, or another religious building; had he wanted to ensure that he would have access to a large number of unarmed victims, he could have targeted a public school or an institution of higher education. Instead, he targeted a nightclub that homosexuals were known to frequent, making it clear that his victims fit a specific demographic. His victims included gay Christians, gay agnostics, gay atheists, and possibly even (whisper it) gay Muslims, and his choice of targets has me convinced that the shooting was a hate crime first and foremost. While it could have been an act of domestic terrorism as well, we must remember that the gunman did not choose the site of the shooting by accident or coincidence - he chose a site where he would have access to targets of a specific sexual orientation, without concern for their religious views. I, for one, see no reason to believe he would have stopped his bloody rampage if he'd learned that one of the people he gunned down was a fellow Muslim.
Allow me to back up for a moment, in case any of my dear readers read the words "gay Muslims" and thought it was an oxymoron. Yes, there are more than 70 countries in which homosexuality is a criminal or even capital offense. Some - but not all - of these countries have majority Muslim populations, though the ones with majority Muslim populations tend to have the most severe penalties for homosexual conduct. While these attitudes are becoming increasingly difficult for people from the United States and more liberal countries to accept, it is important to realize that they are not unique to Muslims or Muslim countries. There was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy, support, and aid for the victims of the Orlando shooting from Americans of all religious and cultural backgrounds, but there were also those who used the tragedy to support their anti-homosexual biases. We can argue that no true Christian would respond to the shooting in anything other than a loving and supportive manner...but if we do, we must also acknowledge that the most vocal members of the Muslim community have done the same. We do them no favors by conflating their more open and affirming beliefs with those of an organization that a majority of them despise and disavow. We must also acknowledge that there are people within the Muslim community who are torn between their own sexual orientation and what their culture has told them is acceptable. These people are why organizations such as the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity exist, and why a lone gunman decided to end dozens of lives at a Florida nightclub on June 12, 2016.
If we accept that the shooting was first and foremost a hate crime, dear readers, then love is the best response to it. We must show love to the homosexuals in our lives, accepting them as contributing members of our society who are no less deserving of life or freedom than anyone else. We must show love to the Muslims among us, letting them know that we will not hold all of them responsible for the actions of one deeply disturbed individual. And we must show love to all those with differing worldviews, acknowledging that progress is incremental and will result from changed attitudes and a concerted effort to understand the "other." Love may not conquer all, but it's the best weapon we have to prevent tragedies like this from taking place in the future.
I will now cease my starry-eyed idealistic ramblings, and hope that they got at least one person thinking.
This week has been a very tiring one. I just finished my third week of a summer grammar class and my second week of a summer PLA class, in both of which I have small but dedicated groups of students. After getting a phone call from my supervisor on Monday afternoon, I also picked up an evening class that started on Tuesday and meets three nights a week. I was equally unhappy about the short notice and the split schedule and came very close to telling my supervisor to find someone else to teach the class, but my damnable sense of responsibility kicked in and I agreed to it. I figure that being a full-time instructor (until the end of the month, at least) means that I need to be willing to do more than what would be required of an adjunct, and I especially dislike the thought of leaving a class without a capable, passionate instructor to teach it. However, I've made it clear to my supervisor that I don't want to do this again if it can be avoided - being both a morning person and a night person puts a real damper on my social life, and makes it even harder for me to maintain a consistent sleep schedule. Thankfully, the students in my night class are very engaged and creative, and we have a lot of fun together. One of them is a Brazilian au pair who's interested in the nuances of English and different ways of expressing similar ideas; she often brings up grammatical constructs that will appear in later units and asks if they could be applied to the examples at hand, which means that we won't be progressing through the textbook in a strictly linear fashion. How refreshing!
That aside, I don't want to regale my dear readers with tales of my week at work when far more important events have been unfolding elsewhere in the nation. I've been doing some thinking and listening to a lot of radio reports about the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last Sunday, and I want to share some of the things that have been on my mind. Disagreement and/or discussion are both welcome.
Predictably, factions emerged and fingers began pointing before Omar Mateen's gun had even cooled. Some blamed Muslims, some blamed homosexuals, some blamed firearms, and some blamed American culture. Some, in an appalling display of insensitivity, took to Twitter to say the victims reaped what they sowed or proclaim that the Islamic State was behind the shooting and congratulate a xenophobic, narcissistic demagogue and pathological liar for correctly predicting a terrorist attack. All sides made a lot of assumptions, and none of them were entirely accurate.
To be fair, it's hard to definitively classify this shooting as either a terrorist attack or a hate crime, especially as those close to the gunman have spoken up and new information about him has emerged. Yes, he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State before the attack, but he also had strong homosexual tendencies. His father Seddique Mir Mateen said shortly after the attack that religion had nothing to do with it, subsequently saying that it's up to God to punish gays and he would have personally arrested his son if he'd known about his plans ahead of time. Some might read the elder Mateen's statements as weak attempts to exonerate either Islam or himself from being blamed for his son's heinous crime; I would encourage those who think so to look at the responses of the larger Muslim community, which has called for overwhelming love and condemned the gunman's actions as antithetical to the core teachings of Islam (to which the Islamic State absolutely does not subscribe).
No, dear readers, I do not blame Islam itself for this shooting. While it's true that mainstream Islam does not condone non-heteronormative behavior, evidence suggests that differing religious views were not the motive for the shooting, or at least not the primary one. Had the gunman wanted to make an ideological statement, he could have targeted a church, a synagogue, a temple, or another religious building; had he wanted to ensure that he would have access to a large number of unarmed victims, he could have targeted a public school or an institution of higher education. Instead, he targeted a nightclub that homosexuals were known to frequent, making it clear that his victims fit a specific demographic. His victims included gay Christians, gay agnostics, gay atheists, and possibly even (whisper it) gay Muslims, and his choice of targets has me convinced that the shooting was a hate crime first and foremost. While it could have been an act of domestic terrorism as well, we must remember that the gunman did not choose the site of the shooting by accident or coincidence - he chose a site where he would have access to targets of a specific sexual orientation, without concern for their religious views. I, for one, see no reason to believe he would have stopped his bloody rampage if he'd learned that one of the people he gunned down was a fellow Muslim.
Allow me to back up for a moment, in case any of my dear readers read the words "gay Muslims" and thought it was an oxymoron. Yes, there are more than 70 countries in which homosexuality is a criminal or even capital offense. Some - but not all - of these countries have majority Muslim populations, though the ones with majority Muslim populations tend to have the most severe penalties for homosexual conduct. While these attitudes are becoming increasingly difficult for people from the United States and more liberal countries to accept, it is important to realize that they are not unique to Muslims or Muslim countries. There was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy, support, and aid for the victims of the Orlando shooting from Americans of all religious and cultural backgrounds, but there were also those who used the tragedy to support their anti-homosexual biases. We can argue that no true Christian would respond to the shooting in anything other than a loving and supportive manner...but if we do, we must also acknowledge that the most vocal members of the Muslim community have done the same. We do them no favors by conflating their more open and affirming beliefs with those of an organization that a majority of them despise and disavow. We must also acknowledge that there are people within the Muslim community who are torn between their own sexual orientation and what their culture has told them is acceptable. These people are why organizations such as the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity exist, and why a lone gunman decided to end dozens of lives at a Florida nightclub on June 12, 2016.
If we accept that the shooting was first and foremost a hate crime, dear readers, then love is the best response to it. We must show love to the homosexuals in our lives, accepting them as contributing members of our society who are no less deserving of life or freedom than anyone else. We must show love to the Muslims among us, letting them know that we will not hold all of them responsible for the actions of one deeply disturbed individual. And we must show love to all those with differing worldviews, acknowledging that progress is incremental and will result from changed attitudes and a concerted effort to understand the "other." Love may not conquer all, but it's the best weapon we have to prevent tragedies like this from taking place in the future.
I will now cease my starry-eyed idealistic ramblings, and hope that they got at least one person thinking.