There's been more violence.
Your mind must be reeling. The Middle-East? Baltimore? Ferguson? NYC? Nigeria? The Ukraine?
There's a lot of violence going on in the world.
I'm talking about Texas. More specifically Garland, Texas.
You've never heard of it, have you?
And you likely never would have, except that one woman decided to fan the flames. No, she did more than fan the flames. She threw gasoline on the fire and THEN she fanned the flames.
A woman with too much time and money on her hands decided to have a contest. For cartoonists. To draw Mohammed.
Seriously.
Yes, yes, I know we live in the United States and we all have First Amendment rights and freedom of speech. I realize she had the right to hold this contest. But should she have?
Just because you CAN call people names, should you?
Just because you CAN contribute unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns (yeah, I'm talking to you Roberts Court), should you?
Just because you CAN hold a protest outside of a military funeral, should you?
Life is all about limits. Part of life is finding out what your limits are and where those limits come from--are they self-imposed? can you overcome them? are they coming from people around you? from institutions around you? These are all important questions to answer in pursuit of figuring out limits.
We are all born with limits. I, for one, am never going to run a sub-seven(okay, eight, okay, nine, okay in all likelihood ten) minute mile. It's just not going to happen no matter how hard I train. But I know this. So while I still run and I still try hard, I am not trying to achieve the unattainable. I respect the limit. If I didn't, I would likely end up injured.
Society imposes limits upon us. We call these laws. When people break laws, when they ignore the limits, they go to jail. Or they get hurt. Or worse yet, other people get hurt.
That's what happens, often times, when people do not respect limits. Bad things happen.
The difficult part of all this is when we come to moral and ethical limits. Because clearly everyone's morals and ethics vary to some degree. But not nearly as much as people think.
For the most part, people know what is good and bad. What is right and wrong. What should be done and what should be left undone.
I understand that there are times when boundaries must be pushed, when laws must be broken. The Civil Rights movement was definitely an example of a time when lines had to be crossed, laws broken, and boundaries pushed so that the boundaries could actually be moved. There was an end-game to that struggle. There was a purpose, a noble one that would lift people up and create better lives.
I do not see that end-game with this situation in Texas. It appears to me that her purpose with this contest was to incite violence so that she could then blame the ENTIRE Muslim community for jihad.
Recently I read about an interview that Fox News' (and I use that term loosely) Sean Hannity did with an imam. He blamed radical terrorism (pretty much all of it) on Islam the religion, and stated that the situation has to be solved within Islam. Here is the Imam's response:
“Mr. Hannity, life is sacred in Islam as well as Christianity and Judaism, and it is the collective responsibility of Muslims, Christians and Jews to stand for the sanctity of life regardless of where that life belongs to.”
That's an end-game we should all try to achieve together.
