Imagine.(Part One)

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible. ~Maya Angelou

I saw this yesterday morning.
I've been intending to write something more about all the crazy shit going on this last week. Every time I go to write something, something else comes up and I lose my train of thought, but this bit stuck. So we'll start here.

Steve King said he didn't want Muslims working in the meat packing plants in his district "Because they think consumers will go to hell for eating pork chops."

First of all, there's just one small problem with that...and that's that those meat packing plants can't get enough white Americans to work there to be able to function. Working in places like that is hard, nasty work and a lot of white Americans think such work is beneath them.

So why shouldn't Albanians or Mexicans, or Somalis or Zimbabweans come here to do it? Someone has to.

If not, why not?

It's not just that, though. It's the staggering, willful ignorance of people like Steve King about other cultures, races and religions that pisses me off.

It's the racism, because while racists often seem to know fuck-all about history, they sure can remember that Black people were slaves once, and for some reason this guy on Fox News brought it up at some point yesterday, as Rick noted. These fucking idiots can't tell you much more about Islam than that Muslims don't drink alcohol or eat pork, but they sure can tell you stuff about this Confederate General or that old-school Segregationist politician. They can't tell you jack shit about Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Somalia, but they'll expound exponentially about the evils of Chicago or what's wrong with California. They'll endlessly tell you to be afraid of Islam and Muslims but they generally can't tell you anything about the religion beyond whatever right-wing conspiracy theories they've heard.

If you ask me that's a cheap way to treat such a vast and diverse slice of the human experience. We westerners owe much to Muslims. The mathematics and science that lets me sit here and type this article, surrounded by prancing ferrets, and that when I'm done will allow me to post it...one more drop in the vast sea of information that is the internet...all of the basis for all of this came from Muslims. Algebra as a term, descends from an Arabic word. Modern astronomy and the very basics of navigation all flowed from that same source.

The works of Greek and Roman philosophers...the very basis of Western civilization...were preserved by Muslims in the Middle East, North Africa and Spain while Europe...still shaking off the effects of the fall of Rome a couple of centuries before...beat itself into bloody, illiterate feudal savagery. While in Europe, the flame of knowledge never died out entirely...Astronomers and scientists became part of the King's court. In Syria...the son of a beggar could aspire to become a scientist and achieve his goal if he had the drive and the intelligence.

The Muslim world has cities every bit as vast and cosmopolitan as the West, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul, Jakarta, Samarkand, Tehran. It contains a staggeringly diverse array of cultures, Arabs, Albanians, Berbers, Black Africans, Bosniaks, Chinese, Crimean Tatars, Malays, Palestinians, Tauregs, Turks, Uyghurs and American and European converts of every color and description, the list goes on.

There are those whose cultures that Islam shaped or added its strength to were snared in the shackles of time, and to whom we modern people owe a great debt for shaping the very world we live in, the Fatimid Shiites of Egypt, fierce and terrible Mongols, mighty Mamluks, and wondrous Moors,

...And Muslims have been in this country, or influenced it, right from the beginning. When Representative Keith Ellison was sworn into office, he swore his oath on a Koran once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

Let me teach you, as my Muslim friends and much life experience and study have taught me.

We'll start with King's complaint...that somehow Somalis will worry about the souls of their employers' customers? Sorry, but that's just plain ridiculous. Unless you go to a Muslim country that's not very diverse, like the Maldives, or one where a Fundamentalist interpretation of Islam is the law of the State, like Saudi Arabia...no one is going to force a Halal diet on you. There are varying degrees of practice and levels of piety even in a Fundamentalist nut-house like Saudi.

Here's a pro tip, too. You can get beer, or weed, or whatever you want in Saudi Arabia too. It's just a matter of knowing the right people and having enough money. Friends and social class are everything here...in fact members of the Saudi Royal Family are infamous for their alcohol and drug-fueled parties. Just like police everywhere else, the Saudi Department of Public Safety has a drug unit. Just like police everywhere else, it's less likely to bother those who provide its equipment and sign its paychecks.

People like Steve King forget the obvious fact that people are people, and even in a country like Saudi where the penalty for a lot of things (even things that might not be a crime elsewhere) is death, people break the law. The Mutawa, the "religious" police (Saudi Arabia has both religious police and secular public safety officers) are just as often on the take as police in other countries. Many of their officers are actually recruited from prisons, because they became a Hafiz (memorized the Koran) while they were locked up. In point of fact, the Saudi Shura council (the governing body of Islamic clerics within Saudi Arabia) had to issue a Fatwa simply to get the Mutawa officers...of their own Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice...to obey traffic laws. I read this on the Al Jazeera website a few years ago and the comments section was hilarious and full of Saudi people making jokes at the expense of the Mutaween.

A couple of years ago, a Royal Saudi Air Force airman posted to Keesler Air Force Base for training got arrested for having sex with an underage boy while he was on vacation in Las Vegas. He was charged, tried, convicted and sent to a US Federal prison. When this happened, the airman was drunk. I bring this up not to point out some kind of evil, here, but to show that despite different countries and cultures, people are more the same than you'd think. If you ask anybody who's ever been to prison they'll usually back up my theory that if you take everything else away, there are three things people will still always try to do. Get high, have sex, or kill somebody.

Fundamentalist theocracies aren't that much different from prison, what religion they claim doesn't really matter. In countries like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, where rigid segregation of the sexes is enforced, a lot of premarital fucking around is situationally bisexual. In Afghanistan, for example, the customs are so deeply entrenched and unofficially tolerated that there are sayings about it. "Boys are for pleasure, women are for children" and such. I'm not saying it's right..it's just how it is over there and only those people are ever really going to be able to change it.

Afghanistan also...and especially thanks to the War on Terror...has a drug problem that makes our Opioid crisis look like a couple teenage girls smoking a joint on the weekend. It's not just in terms of growing and selling Hashish and Opium as cash crops either. Lots of people use. Friends and several relatives of mine served over there, and they all said the same thing...that the NATO & US troops were the only ones who weren't lit up as fuck, even while on duty sometimes. Oh, and the oh-so-righteous Taliban are some of the worst ones in this regard...and there's a reason pious Muslims don't want their sons joining the Taliban that (if you've been paying attention) has nothing to do with that they might get killed.

I'm not saying these people are evil, I'm not saying they're righteous either. What I'm saying is, they're people. A lot of these guys have been fighting for their whole lives. An 18-year old kid who joined the Mujahideen in the early 1980's to fight the Soviets with nothing more than an AK-47, his own guts, some improvised explosives and a few years later our FIM-92 Stinger Missiles...if he survived, often fighting both the Soviets and then later the Americans...is today a 50 year old man who, if he was lucky, was able to marry and have kids...and now his sons are fighting too, whether against us or against the Daesh, they fight...especially if they are Pashtuns steeped in tribal ethos of honor, hospitality, and revenge.

But understand one thing, even an illiterate Pashtun who fights for the Taliban might know who Snoop Dogg is, and have heard his music. He certainly understands sophisticated insurgent tactics and how to use the lay of the land to his advantage. If that Taliban fighter has a son, his son might just dream of coming to America and being a doctor. Never assume that someone is stupid just because they don't meet your cultural benchmarks.

The Taliban have been smart enough to tie the vaunted US Army in knots. The Afghans who are theoretically on our side have been shrewd enough to set up their end of a supply pipeline that floods our country with cheap heroin...and the areas most affected by the Opioid crisis correlate closely with the ones whose people supported (or continue to support) Donald Trump.

Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires for a damn reason.

And we were dumb enough to invade this country? Not only that but we did so in the service of goals and ideals that those people can barely understand and care about even less. But while you're at it, understand one thing. If we packed up our shit and left tomorrow most of those people would never even think about us again.

Somalia is much the same, actually probably worse off. That country hasn't had an effective government since 1991. In point of fact, it was the Islamists of the Islamic Courts Union that came the closest to providing the kinds of basic services or law and order that even the poorest White Americans in Kentucky and West Virginia can absolutely take for granted. In fact, while white Americans might resent that lawful authority, and try to keep it pointed at somebody else, Somalis treasure it. Why? Because they've seen the alternative. In Minnesota, where the largest Somali-American community is located, the Somali Community is represented in the state legislature by the first Somali-American elected official, a woman named Ilhan Omar...a Democrat. The state's Republican Party has a Somali at the head of its immigrant relations group. Somalis serve disproportionately in the Air & Army National Guards, and in the police force. If the Republicans would get their head out of their ass they'd see that these people would be a natural constituency, in fact probably an ideal one.

But of course they won't because Somalis are Black.

The only big business in Somalia is Piracy.

Americans love their guns, and the idea of conflict and war (though not the actuality of it.) But imagine, if you will, having nothing, living in a country where $1,000 means you can live like a king, imagine looking out over the ocean and seeing passing international shipping. Imagine having nothing but an AK-47, a small boat and your own guts and sailing the wine-dark sea to try and break off a piece of all that free trade and global society and international order for yourself...so you can eat. Then, imagine having to take on a United States Navy Arleigh Burke-class Guided Missile Destroyer to get it. Imagine having to fight a seagoing insurgency against all that firepower and technology with just a dozen guys carrying Kalashnikovs. People do it, and they do it gladly.

Imagine being a young, intrepid Somali dude, on a speedboat with a rifle in your hands, the salt spray of the sea in your face, out to capture a container ship or some rich guy's yacht and ransom the crew. Out there, over the horizon, and on your mother-ship's radar screen, is big money, a life. All the girls want the pirates, maybe you're there because you want adventure, maybe you're there because the only marketable skill you have is driving a boat or shooting and you just want to eat. But either way, to get it...you only have to get past half the world's navies. There's always the possibility that some US Navy Fire-Controlman or Russian Matros will see your boat, or its mother-ship on radar, that orders will be given and keys turned and that from 100 kilometers away (or more) somebody will kill you.

If you get caught and survive, if you're lucky you'll go to prison in the EU, the UK or the US. Those less lucky end up in Kenyan prisons or Russian Gulags. but still, despite this literal ocean of risk, the young men sign on, they do so gladly. Imagine facing down all that shit, and deciding to go to sea anyway. Now imagine doing so because you have to eat.

I'm not saying they're good, I'm not saying they're evil. I'm saying they're people, with people's needs and kids and families and shit, just trying to get by like everybody else...but dealt a worse hand than most. If the only way to make the leap from poverty to adequacy was piracy, I'd take it, wouldn't you? Why is it always somehow different when it's a person of Color having to make that call?

One of my Muslim friends had a theory back in the day that Americans hate Islam because it requires charity and rejects racism on a scriptural level (even though many Muslims do not follow this) and because Muslims are less likely to drink or smoke or do drugs and therefore harder for those with much money to control and manipulate.

When I told that same guy that Donald Trump said he didn't need God's forgiveness...he didn't believe me at first. When I showed him the video clip he lost his cool and replied "He really said that? Wow, what a bitch!"

That guy had, and still has, as his E-mail signature "The shortest distance between a problem and its solution is the distance between your knees and the floor. The person who kneels before God can stand up to anything."

As a lapsed Christian whose faith was in crisis at the time I found that to be powerful advice. This Muslim dude and his friends did far more to help me than any Christians I knew at the time. The Christians mostly just wanted to take advantage.

The truth..the point...is this: Muslims are each and every one different, just like Christians. It's not your religion that matters, it's what you do with it. Muslims don't hate America, may of them are Americans. 1.6% of American citizens are Muslim. Many of them were born here, still more come here and gladly sign on to the idea of being an American and undergo the Naturalization process and have, or one day will, raise their right hand and swear before God and Man that they will be faithful citizens of the United States...and make no mistake about that, either, Allah is simply the Arabic word for "God."

Now tell me something, honestly. If you were in the shoes of that young Somali dude and you have the choice between dealing with all this crazy shit that I just spoke about, or coming to America and living a simple life in a simple town in Iowa, and working as a chicken plucker and signing on to this mundane American life, which would you pick?

There are dark and dangerous places in the world. I know this. I've seen a few of them. We are blessed here in America, even though men like Donald Trump and Steve King want to make America more like one of those dark and dangerous places, they will fail.

Why?

Trump and his Republicans will fail for the same reason that American and Soviet armies could not subjugate Afghanistan, for the same reason that half the world's navies cannot keep Somali pirates from sailing the wine-dark sea, and for the same reason that all the Imams in Mecca can't keep a Saudi dude from getting laid.

It is human nature to resist. It is human nature to want to be free. For all our different cultural or religious definitions of freedom, we all want to have it. We all have the right to claim it. All people are very much the same. It's not the religion that matters, it's not the color of your skin, it's what you do with all that. People have intrinsic value, and inalienable rights. America was founded on the idea that people could come here and be not what they were born...but what they have it in themselves to be.

And that's true whether you pray to Allah or to Christ or to something else.

Now, imagine believing in something even greater. Imagine believing in a nation whose founding document rejected gods, and whose ethos of advancing liberty eventually swore to welcome all.

Now imagine being small and weak enough to want to tear that down, and do it for money and prejudice and shitty ideologies and forbidden allegiances to foreign despots.

Fuck you, Steve.

Imagine (Part Two)