Words I am scared to write
I have been doing some work on the current series. I am reading material on the relationships between countries in the area of the conflict. It's tough to me to feel as though I am entitled to have an opinion. On The Guardian, I've gotten put down by people who are enraged on all sides of opinion. When did being a Progressive Humanist start being a bad thing?
I have also been searching for news sources from the Near East. It's weird because I am scared even to type the following words on my blog for fear that I am going to be tagged as a some kind of non-American. I've been watching English Al Jazeera. I'm even more scared that I linked to it on my blog--somehow I will be banned from commercial airlines or fail to qualify for a mortgage. Given what happened to that family on AirTran last week, I wouldn't be surprised. My husband had an excellent point: if they were going to destroy the plane, why did they want the "safest" seats? Frankly, I want to know how America looks from an outsider's perspective. You know, the whole forest for the trees thingy.
Our cable company had a chance to carry English Al Jazeera and it was shouted down by people who thought it would convert Americans to the terrorist cause. Huh?
What's wrong with getting another news market's take on World events? Especially from those places in the World where Wars and Combat and Killing is going down? Should I be labeled with a question mark because I watched the BBC when there was still strife with Northern Ireland? Or read Irish newspapers when I traveled there in 1993?
This is what the so-called Patriot Act has done to my sense of freedom of speech. Just because there are extremists in the Muslim world doesn't mean every Muslim is an extremist.
As Gen. Colin Powell said on Meet the Press when he endorsed Obama:
Exactly. My point exactly.
We will never be free from fear until the unknown becomes the known.
