My feed is full of people protesting the ban on Muslim migrants.
Every few seconds my phone goes off--people are organizing. Pro-immigrant, pro-Muslim solidarity marches are being planned. Speakers have to be found, bullhorns procured, cardboard is being affixed to broom-handles and witty slogans are being scrawled.
Good. I’m glad. Keep it up.
My wife wears hijab.
We went for sushi the other night and a man in one those faux-military baseball caps with the name-tape on the back and the American flag on the front eyed her as we took our seats. It wasn’t exactly a glare, more the look I imagine a drone pilot might have when focusing his camera on a target.
In ten years of being a Muslim I still haven’t quite adjusted to the idea that someone might hate me without actually speaking to me. It rankles something in my core programming, it disturbs some part of my fundamental white-ness.
But you don’t even know me!
She wasn’t perturbed. It’s old scarf for her.
The man in the hat with the Miso soup put me in a contemplative mood.
He had looked upon us and adjudged us enemies--but he had done so beneath a noren--one of those little banners covered in Japanese calligraphy so often found hanging in sushi joints.
He hated us because our co-religionists killed a lot of Americans in a suicide attack. And he arrived at that conclusion, about us, while sitting in a Japanese restaurant.
The war which cast such an ironic shadow over my new friends anger lasted for four years.
In that time Japanese-Americans and Japanese migrants were rounded up, their businesses shuttered, their homes confiscated, and their families placed behind barbed wire. That war ended, and those memories and their attendant rage began to fade.
Our war hasn’t. It has lasted for 15, almost 16 years now--and it’s memory was etched in that man’s glare.
And--though I disagree with him, sometimes I have trouble blaming him for feeling the way he does.
Omar Mateen conducted his massacre at the Pulse Nightclub less than a year ago. Seven months, to be exact.
It feels like a decade, but not the kind that mends wounds in its passing.
Political insurgents won’t be the only ones taking advantage of our disunion. There are still the more traditional types out there, waiting to spread a vision of Islam only they and our President seem to share.
The next few years will be challenging. Overwhelming. Exhausting.
I hope my friends, scattered across this country, can continue organizing in our defense. I hope they can continue giving a voice to the people I love.
And I hope they can do all of this, even as the war goes on and the bombs go off.