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I just would like a reality check on this, people:
Last night I talked to my mother. My mother and I have had our differences--mostly about gender & sexuality--but most of the big ones have been worked out and now we mainly get along. She has her limitations, and nobody knows them better than I do, but one thing she has never been is a bigot. She still remembers the civil rights era fondly, and in her own way has been very active in her community to try to work on poverty and race and things like this. One thing you can say about her is that she has never stopped learning; she's constantly taking classes and things like that and has taken several courses about Islam, the Arab world, and whatnot, because my sister has become a Middle East expert and my mother always wants to be into what we're doing.
Well, anyhow, she starts telling me about how she thinks the Muslims who came to the US 3 generations ago are OK, but these new ones, the Muslims who are coming over now and going to their own mosques and their own schools where everyone's always preaching hate, you just have to wonder why they come over here if they hate it so much, and what this new wave of immigration is really about...
After she had gone on this way for a while, I finally broke in and said, "Mom, you don't REALLY believe that this is all part of a worldwide Islamist conspiracy to take over the planet, do you?"
And she says, basically, yeah.
:wtf:
I start arguing with her about this and she keeps saying "But why are they always preaching hatred against us?" Eventually I just started listing all the Sources Of Hatred:
1. U.S. unconditionally supporting Israel no matter what it does to the Palestinians 2. U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia 3. Hanging the Shi'a opposition that we had encouraged to rise up against Saddam out to dry after the 1991 Gulf War 4. Removed Taliban, killed thousands of Afghanis, installed puppet government 5. Invaded Iraq for no good reason, killed 100,000+ civilians, allowed looting to go on unchecked, still can't restore order after more than a year, currently winding up a horrific atrocity excuse me decisive battle against the insurgency in Fallujah 6. Persecuting Muslim- and Arab-Americans who were completely uninvolved in 9/11 just because they were Muslim- and Arab-Americans...
and the list goes on. Mom acknowledges many of these items, still says she thinks these new immigrants are different from the other ones because they stick to themselves and are trying to replicate their own culture here. I say, "You just told me that this is what always happens with a new immigrant population: they stick together for the first generation and then after that they start mingling more with other groups. You can't expect first-generation immigrants to behave like third-generation immigrants. That doesn't make any sense."
Sure, she says, but all the same, we need to stop letting so many of these people in, and it looks like we are, so that's good.
Pissed off, finally, I say that if I ever die in a terrorist attack it'll probably have been carried out by the Christian right.
I say I hope someday this will all be over and we can have a normal country again. She says it looks like that won't be happening for a while.
No shit.
Liza came home and I ranted to her abotu this. Liza has even more reasons to think badly of my mother than I do, but she was still shocked and appalled. "She's disgracing her heritage," she said. "That's what they said abotu the Irish: that we were all going to be helping the Pope take over the country." And as I recall there was some kind of worlwide conspiracy theory about the Jews, way back when...And for God's sake, if you want to get hyped up about a possible fundamentalist takeover of the U.S., look no fucking further than right-wing evangelical Christianity.
ARGH!
So, is my mother special, or are you all starting to get vibes like this from your near and dear too? Because if this is starting to take root here, we're all in big fucking trouble.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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