land of the free, well for some of us anyway

There is a war going on. And it is not in Iraq or Afghanistan. It is going on right here in the United States. No, it is not immigration legislature. That’s not a war, it is just descendents of former poor immigrants refusing to let current immigrants into the country. Racism apparently did not end with the Civil War, Civil Rights, or with the election of a Black president. The war is actually going on in New York City and the issue is over whether to build a Muslim Center near Ground Zero.
Nearly nine years ago 9/11 happened over terrorists who were - and are still - upset over Western and Christian ideals. Just in the news recently a few doctors overseas were not allowed to continue their practice because the authorities thought they were Christians trying to proselytize. Once the powers-that-be figured out that they were not Christians, just citizens trying to be doctors, they let them continue without any problems. Forget freedom of religion.

In a country that demands freedoms to do just about everything, much of the country wants to take that same freedom from other Americans in the form of not allowing them to build a Muslim Center in New York City. In a country that prides itself above everyone else for its laws on freedom - especially freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, religion, etcetera – it is not allowing freedom of religion to its own citizens.

It is ironic – in a horrible, awful way. A country that was founded on freedom over 230 years ago, who fought for freedom, who sat on buses and had sit-ins for freedom now has many people who want to stop fighting for that right. They essentially want to eliminate the freedom of religion for some of our citizens – the very thing that we claim as a country that makes us different.

The Muslim Center is bigger than bricks and mortar. If it is not allowed to be built any claims of freedom will be a hoax, our progressions as a society will be a hoax, and bringing freedom to other countries will be a hoax. The foundations of freedom of 1776 were stained with the blood of Native Americans and Slavery, the Civil War stained with decades of Jim Crow Laws and Exclusion, the Civil Rights stained by a continued ambiguous racism. The freedom of today seems to be for some, but not all.