We apologize for the Inconvenience

I try not to rail against Political Correctness on these blogs – and in person – because it’s one of those topics that are easier to be smug about when you’re a male of European ancestry than it is for anyone else. As such, there are going to be things that I believe are cases of people being too sensitive – or too willing to jump on the PC bandwagon in order to get what they want – that are deadly serious to the people doing the jumping, and it’s really not my place to be telling them so. That said, I still think that the business of a newspaper having to print a public apology to readers for mentioning the end of Ramadan on the anniversary of 9/11 is a Race to the Bottom…

If your local news aggregation cite missed it, you can view the apology here, and the online version of the original article here. Basically, this was a weekend “slow news day” piece about the local observances of the end of Ramadan; something which should not be indicative of anything beyond a small local newspaper not having the budget to do anything really impressive to fill space in the front section over the weekend. But since last Saturday was the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – and since there was no corresponding story about the evil people who claim to be part of the same religion causing those attacks – apparently a whole bunch of people started calling, writing and flaming the paper in protest…

I can’t really fault the paper for taking this position; it’s a business operating in a relatively small town, and it can’t really afford to risk alienating people who buy papers or ad space in papers in the community it serves. Printing an editorial that says, in effect, “we’re sorry if we said anything that offended you” is not much of an issue in itself. What seems unfortunate (at the very least) is that a harmless piece of low-intensity writing (you can’t really call it reporting) would cause such an outcry in the first place. There have been Muslims living in the United States for well over a century now, and for the most part, no one paid any attention to them, any more than they did to the Buddhists, Hindus, or Zoroastrians, until the wave of militant fundamentalism that had been building in Central Asia resulted in the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Even then, Americans in general would probably have ignored the whole thing if not for the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the World Trade Center bombing in the 1990s, and the outrages of September 11th, 2001…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t still be furious about the attacks on American soil, or outraged at the deaths of over 3,000 innocent people who died on that day nine years ago. And it should probably be acknowledged that actions like publically calling for the execution (or outright murder) of cartoonists for exercising their civil rights is not a good way to get people to respect your right to exercise your own. But even if we do not wish to consider that some of those who died on 9/11/01 (on the ground and in the airplanes) were Muslims themselves, or that members of that faith have lived among us in peace for their and our entire lives, or even that a bunch of cave-dwelling idiots half a world away do not speak for the American Islamic community any more than a local nutcase preacher in Florida with fewer than 50 followers speaks for everyone else in the U.S., it’s still hard to imagine what would be wrong with a simple newspaper article about local residents, neighbors and taxpayers all, celebrating a holiday…

Folks, what made this country the greatest one in the world wasn’t some mindless devotion to a political ideal that no one should ever be offended by anything, any more than it was a fanatical adherence to any particular religion or a determination to only have people who look, act, sound and behave “like us” living here. What made us great was the willingness to take all of the best things that all of our thousands of immigrant groups brought from all over the world and combine them into something stronger and more powerful than any one people or nation could ever be. The “melting pot” we all learned about in civics class isn’t kettle, it’s a forge – and the alloy that has come out of it is why all Americans believe, without a trace of irony, that we really are the shining example for the rest of the world, and the hope for humanity’s future. “From Many, One” isn’t just a fancy slogan to print on money; it’s who we are and it’s how we came to be this way…

And if we’ve lost sight of that; if we have reached a time when it’s more important to shout angry slogans about the “other” and rage against innocent people for having the temerity to celebrate a holiday that was already a part of their culture a thousand years before we were even a sovereign nation, then it’s our entire society that is racing to the Bottom – and we’re not going to enjoy the ride…