I refuse to stand in fear for a moment longer at the thought that someone might want to hurt or kill me because of something that I may or may not believe. To be fair, I’ve refused to be afraid of terrorism for as long as I can remember, thinking that the tragedy on the eleventh of September, 2001 was more an act of war than of mere fear-mongering. The entire point of terrorism is to instill fear into your opponent, and make them fundamentally change who they are; it is as much a psychological tactic as a physical demonstration of force. If you remove someone’s ability to react rationally, you get to frame every future interaction. In the moment of overwhelming dread, there are only two emotional responses we are hardwired to engage: Fight or Flight. Either you demoralize the entire population into acquiescing to your demands, or you goad them into ill-prepared military engagements they cannot hope to win, especially if your goal was merely to poison the very thing that gave them strength. We have been waging a War on Terror, which is much like punching looming shadows in the twilight. You cannot fight an idea or an emotion from behind a rocket launcher or missile silo, and you can only kill the man with deadly force, not the fanaticism which has made him.

This war, in one form or another, has been going on for centuries, with ever-shifting theaters of conflict and a revolving cast of players. In this country, a good number of decent people have been led to believe that they should fear Muslims, because that is the purported faith of those that have sought to do us harm. Obviously, their faith is wrong, their religion inherently violent: their values are different from our own, and they present a clear danger to our very way of life. Look at the way they dehumanize women, legislating every square inch of their sinfully tempting flesh as to not incite the animal passions of these savages. These infidels claim the weaker sex as property, dictating what rights they have to their own bodies. What kind of monster would treat another human being as something less than human? And those extremists smother any expression of free speech, not only in their own backward lands, but throughout the entire world, threatening harm at those who might seek to slander the tenets and holy figures of their faith. They seek out a way back into the past, based upon words written centuries ago, finding justifications for atrocities in the name of their “God.” It’s our duty to our omnipotent master to wipe the stain of their existence from the face of the earth.

Of course, everything I wrote before, is equally applicable to the other side as well. When you’re misinformed, and facts twisted or withheld from you, you latch on to anything you are told. Extremists are extremists, regardless of which deity they prefer, and do not represent the populace as a whole. There are very few who would argue that the Westboro Baptist Church is representative of what “true” Christians believe or how they should behave. So why then would one believe that the worst of humanity would represent another nominally peaceful religion? Just as those who cherry-pick Leviticus to denounce the “sins” of others, while still doing what they like (arguing that eating shellfish or pork is now okay, as are cheeseburgers and poly-cotton blends, but homosexuality is still against the Law), anyone can skim through a holy book and use it to justify almost anything. And those who seek to reunite the laws of man with the Law of God have no further to look than the lands where we are sending our brave men and women to fight and die in the name of the Almighty Petrol. You cannot ridicule Sharia Law while advocating adorning courthouses with the Ten Commandments.

But I will go one step further now, and call to claim their uncounted dead, those very institutions which permit these types of horrors to persist: I call out those churches and religious leaders (of each and every faith) who have remained silent in the face of bigotry and medieval sentiment until it has become too abhorrent to ignore, or who have, themselves, advocated hateful and vindictive punishments to those who have somehow run afoul of something which they hold so dear. Since the very first protestations of faith in something just beyond, there have been wars to defend the omnipotence and honor of a whole pantheon of supreme beings, and despite the fact that we now know that the earth isn’t flat, and isn’t the center of the universe, have wireless communications and magic boxes capable of reproducing images, sounds, and all the collected wisdom of the ages, still the notion persists that a group of people living in a time before sanitation and germ theory knew all there was to know. As extremists utilize technology (built upon the very science which they find so blasphemous) to murder one another in the name of God, and seek out their place in Paradise, squeezing through the loophole of Thou Shalt Not Kill (…unless they believe something slightly different than you; in that case, go right ahead and wipe the buggers out), they defend to the death their right to impose regulations predating by millennia the tools with which they slaughter others.

To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream that my son will one day live in a world where he will not be judged by the color of his skin, nor belief or disbelief in a higher power, but by the content of his character. Artifices of power have been utilized since the dawn of time to control the common man (who usually wants nothing more than to just survive another day, free of hunger and desperation), and the only thing that has ever truly changed in the days since man worshiped the sun is the name.

-Tex