I don’t know who you think you are—I’m not finger-pointing. I really want to know who you think you are—but if blaming radical Islamism for what happened at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last week is what it takes for you to lay your head on your pillow and rest well at night, then so be it for you. But blaming radical Islamism for gun violence is about as effective as blaming ketchup for tasting like tomatoes. If you don’t like ketchup that tastes like tomatoes, then stop making tomato part of the recipe for ketchup. And if you don’t like Islam that is radical to a point of killing 49 gay people in a single spree, then stop filling your life with things that make for hatred and terror towards those who are not exactly like you. But until you work the assembly line at the ketchup factory or sit on the Board at Heinz or succeed in picketing tomatoes in ketchup, you’ll probably have to go on eating tomato ketchup. And until you gain the necessary trust that allows you to speak out and be heard as a real human being, full of distress and joy, within radical Islamic communities—a trust that isn’t likely to ever come without first costing you both your soul and your life—you’ll sadly have to go on enduring such horrors as we’ve already seen.
The true horror is not that we can’t make ketchup taste more like creme brûlée, but that we can’t change the radicalism and fanaticism of religion. I know someone will suggest that we can. That by carpet bombing ISIS camps we can beat back radical Islamism, whipping it into something more palpable and savory. That won’t change the terrorized heart of a radical though. It will only incite that heart to anger and more violence, and steal away the innocent.
What we can do, at the very least, is to stop inciting our own hearts against each other, and ourselves against them. What we can do is to teach our children that radical Islamism is nothing we would ever call religion. And we can practice our own religion better. We can stop acting so arrogant and taking every piece of proposed gun legislation as a personal attack on our rights. We can agree that basic to human dignity, everyone deserves to feel safe, that safety is a matter of feeling powerful, and that when it comes to power, no one can be trusted with too much of it. To get what we want, more often than not we’re going to have to give up what we already have, and this means being willing to put everything on the table, including our guns. We can remember that such rights as we have are a privilege of the few to be shared with the many, and we’re not always very generous. We can try to walk a day in the shoes of a gay nightclub goer or the parent of an elementary school child. These are things we can do that might be good for us, hopefully for all of us. But don’t do it, any of it even, and I’ll still pass you the ketchup, because no one should have to eat their fries without ketchup.
PleaseGrace 