Giving him his 15 minutes

The world is filled with assholes and idiots. Other than those who pervade the D.C. scene and some others from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, we now have a new player vying for his fifteen minutes of fame. You might say that I’m encouraging that by even writing about this ‘supposed’ man of God, but some things are just too difficult to pass by.

Terry Jones, whom I will not dignify by using the title he has given himself, has caused irreparable damage between Muslim communities everywhere and with the Christian community in the United States. What’s next, Terry, are you next going to burn a Torah because someone who is Jewish took your parking place at Walmart?

Personally, I disagree with Shariah law. That’s my personal belief. I’m not going to burn a Quran. I also disagree with several things in the Holy Bible. I’m not about to burn a bible The Westboro Baptist Church and Fred Phelps turn my stomach. I’m not about to firebomb his house as a part of my distress over what he and his family – incestuous though I think it probably is – do at the funerals of young men and women who died protecting his right to protest.

The Southern Poverty Law Center listed over 600 hate groups in the United States in an intelligence report they issued about a decade ago. I’m betting that number has jumped considerable over the past ten years. We seem to have become a nation of hate rather than a nation of tolerance. These really aren’t the groups that concern me. It’s the one-time Terry Jones, John Hinckley, Timothy McVeigh types who suddenly pop up out of nowhere and do such horrible acts that really bother the daylights out of me. These people are mentally retarded and morally repugnant to me. Jones’ actions have cost the lives of God-only-knows how many members of the military and civilian bystanders. How can he justify that? The point is that he cannot, largely because he can’t see beyond his own burning hatred and the lens of the television camera that’s filming his ugliness.

America was once called “the melting pot.” We accepted everyone. Remember what Emma Lazarus wrote so many years ago…”With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’” What a marvelous greeting to immigrants first espying Lady Liberty with her torch on high. And they came; and they worked hard; and they achieved. Yes, some went down a crooked path, but for the most part, these are the people who created America; a “land of the free” and when it came time to defend her, “the home of the brave.” Unfortunately, our melting pot has become poisoned by the descendants of some of our “wretched refuse” who don’t fully understand what America is and what America means.

Maybe I’m a little off base here, but I think it might not be a bad idea to round up the members of some of these groups and ship them off to Somalia or the Ivory Coast or another of the spots around the globe where intolerance of their actions would bring swift and permanent consequences. America is a much more tolerant society than most of those these groups would find if they were elsewhere. The kicker is that these idiots know that; they know they can get away with things in America that would never be tolerated under a different type of leadership. You piss some of those folks off and you’ll find yourself holding your head literally in your hands and wondering WTF!

I began by saying that the world is filled with assholes and idiots. Perhaps it should be added that America seems to have more than her fair share. We have laws to protect us from some extreme behaviors. Shouting “Fire” falsely in a crowded theatre violates the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech. It’s a slippery slope to tighten some of these amendments, but something must be done to halt the actions of an idiot like Terry Jones who, by burning a book that is considered holy to millions upon millions of people, also caused the deaths of more people than he has in his entire congregation. I wonder if, perhaps, we could ask Terry to personally set up a branch of his church in the Congo; then we could send Fred Phelps to Gabon – it’s just the next tiny country abutting the Congo – and they could collaborate to sell “their” form of hatred to the citizens. Gee, wouldn’t that be fun.