Be Unafraid, For You Have Power...

  This weekend a white man in his forties in camo pants and combat boots charged into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin with guns blazing and his heart full of hatred. This man, identified post-mortem as Wade Michael Page, was a U.S. Army veteran and a white supremacist.

  Survivors from this attack say Page seemed to diliberately target men in turbans, which are required of male adherents to Sikhism. This would seem to confirm, when one also considers Page's prominent  9-11 tattoo, that Page was under the impression that the Sikhs were Muslims, and that it was

his mission somehow to kill "the enemy."  

  Page's heinous crime is indicative of the larger problem we have here in the U.S.; which is that there is a not insignificant percentage of our population that is willfully ignorant, brazenly racist, heavily armed, and, worst of all, flat convinced they are right and that they have God on their side.  In other words, exactly like the members of al Qaida in every way except religious affiliation, language, and place of birth.

  Which raises this question in my mind; what good is a war against terrorists half a world away when we are creating then right here at home? We create them via a complex combination of factors. Most important among them are: religious indoctrination, biased and inaccurate news coverage, and an education system that leaves many students scarcely more literate than when they first started school in the first place. Those who don't actively seek different opinions or facts by reading a plethora of different books and taking in many different viewpoints are destined to, at the least, a life of ignorance, and at worst, to become a blunt instrument against which everything that it comes in contact with is broken.

   The former live fairly benign lives, going about the business of consumption, but leaving behind them no trail of bodies, no crushed psyches, no headlines. The worst thing these people are really guilty of is merely perpetuating the culture of anti-intellectualism by what they teach their kids, which they seem to make at a break-neck pace. They intend to keep it stupid for generations to come but we as a people are no worse for their presence, provided of course they don't inter-breed with the thinking people; which would require a thinking person actually stop thinking, so no worries there.

  The latter, however, are extremely dangerous. These are the people who are so resolute in their beliefs as to not only want everyone else to adhere to them, but to seek to violently punish those who don't. Many of history's most notorious and infamous people shared this trait. What were Napoleon, Hitler, Pol Pot, or even Jim Jones if not hopelessly devoted to very narrow, simple, but unyielding ideals? 

  This is the sort of person who could walk into a place as peaceful and serene as a Sikh temple and kill strangers, believing the penalty for divergent thought is death. The penalty for not blindly accepting their singular world-view is death. The penalty for not being white, for not worshipping Jesus, for not being born an American with red white and blue blood, is death. The details of their particular obsessive psychoses vary, the end result does not. The result is always horror. The result is always shattered families. The result is always loss.

  What, then, is the answer to this? How do we win a war of ideals when the opposition is so willfully ignorant? There is no simple answer to that. It will not be one thing but an alloy of various cooperating elements that will rid our society of willful ignorance. 

  The first step is always the hardest to convince ourselves to make, but it's always the easiest in hindsight.  The first step, in my view, is to stop tolerating ignorance within your own arms' reach. Whenever you're in the presence of someone espousing hate and intolerance, poke holes in their logic. Contradict their false claims and take the poison from their words with your own. Be as insistent and forceful in your approach as they are with theirs. Forcefully educate those you can, simply drown out and overpower those who refuse to learn. By no means should you sit by idle while they infect the ears of those around you. It's like second-hand smoke of the mind, and you don'thave to tolerate it.

  The next step is to simply repeat step one over and over and over until we have silenced the forces of hate and stupidity. Eventually, people will come to realize that spitting venom on and terrorizing those who are different is met with such uproarious disapproval and the penalties for hate crimes are so steep that they will trip over themselves trying to learn all they can about peace, acceptance and love. Because, I believe, once they really get a taste of that, they'll begin to crave it. It will feel so good loving and accepting and being loved and accepted that they won't be able to get enough of it. They will become agents for love themselves, and they will teach the next person, and so on, and so on, on down the line until the world is truly at peace. I don't think this is impossible. I hope you agree.

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Twitter: @JACarlisle1