Seattle - On February 10, three young people were shot dead near their condominium building in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The young man and two young women were members of the same family, and they were Muslims. Their killing was either a hate crime or the regrettable result of a dispute over parking.
That it could well carry both meanings at once seems beyond the imagination of many Americans, determined as they are to avert their eyes from the obvious and to excuse themselves from feeling or expressing human sympathy for their fellow human beings - and fellow Americans - whom they prefer to define as "foreign."
Regardless of the motivation or state of mind of the killer Craig Stephen Hicks, the fact that his victims were Muslim matters, in a society that has allowed itself over the past 13 1/2 years to become thoroughly marinated in Islamophobia. Yes, we've been made this way by the appalling actions of the Muslim world's extremist terrorists. But we also know darn well that the governments of the West, especially the United States government, have played it to their advantage. And, if we are honest, we've willingly colluded in our own manipulation.
On Wednesday, February 11, I felt a responsibility to write about the Chapel Hill killings because, as the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan, I have experienced the humanity of many Pakistanis as well as of many Pakistani-Americans and other Muslims here in the United States. To remind oneself and others of our shared humanity is not the same as "singing Kumbaya," as many who style themselves hard-nosed realists like to put it. After 49 years on this planet - obsessively traveling all over this planet, in fact - I harbor no illusions about humanity being thoroughly wonderful, or about mutual understanding being an easy thing to achieve. I know that not all Muslims are wonderful human beings. But I also know that all Muslims are, in fact, human beings. And to insist that human beings should behave better than we do toward each other is the opposite of naive.
I titled my article "Muslims Should Live, Not Die, in America." I'm spurred to write again today because I'm appalled by the many comments it prompted on the Huffington Post and on my Facebook page: "Muslims are evil killers and need to be eradicated," wrote one self-styled American patriot, Micheal Dorrell, on Facebook. "You people are evil and should be destroyed!" wrote another, Darren Simpson. Such words are hate speech. I would prefer not to name their authors, but they named themselves, and people should be held accountable for their words as well as their actions. When I suggested that surely the three young people in Chapel Hill didn't deserve to be killed, Micheal Dorrell replied: "Yes casualty of war."
The depression I've been feeling since then proves that words have power. But I decline to grant such words power over me. Sometimes I comfort myself by remembering Paul Farmer's dictum that depression is a rational response to the state of the world. But that's at best a bleak and shallow comfort. The only partially effective antidote that I've found, both to the state of the world and to the depression it engenders, is action.
But what kind of action? For starters, not violent action - there's already too much of that. The form of action most readily available to me, as a writer, is to write. That - reclaiming language from both the terrorists and the state - is necessary. But it's not sufficient. I remind myself daily of something Albert Camus, who seems daily more freshly relevant, said: "It is from the moment when I shall no longer be more than a writer that I shall cease to write."
Another form of action available to us Americans is to train ourselves to cease clinging to an outdated and untenable national way of life. Here is how I put it in a speech to TCU students on January 15:
More and more these days, I feel that the need of our times, for those of us who have been accustomed to enjoying a middle-class American way of life, is to begin cultivating an attitude of what Buddhists call non-attachment. Buddhists - as well as serious practitioners of other religions, including Christianity - understand that true freedom has a lot to do with teaching ourselves not to want things that we don't really need. In other times and places, dictatorships have flourished with at least the tacit acquiescence, and often the active support, of their society's middle class, the portion of society that usually cherishes security and stability more than freedom and justice.
The other thing all of us need to face is a question: Which side are you on? The sides we have to choose from are, emphatically, not "the West" and "Islam." Our choice - your choice - is between the side of humanity and the side of war. Are innocent young Muslim dental students in North Carolina merely casualties of war, as Micheal Dorrell claims to believe? If you believe that, then you support the notion that the human race will and should remain in a state of universal and perpetual war. If we want any future better than that, we must allow ourselves to believe in and work toward such a future, hard as that is to do.
I don't know, specifically, everything that the following implies, but here is a starting point: Those of us who would preserve and renew humane society must become as active and assertive as the terrorists and other bullies. Real counterterrorism lies not in governments setting up police states ostensibly to protect us, but in us - each of us ordinary people - not only declaring that enough is enough, but turning off our televisions and laptops, getting off our couches, and demonstrating that we actually mean it.