In the aftermath of 9/11, most of us across the nation continued living our daily lives. Every morning we’d go to work. The worldwide web was pretty much shut down as far as news sites, so there wasn’t a lot to read online. Network TV was carrying 24-hour-a-day coverage, so there weren’t a lot of new entertainment episodes to watch, just cable shows and retro TV. Airports were closed for a couple of weeks, so no one was going anywhere till the skies were declared safe again. At night many of us just stayed home, after dinner playing board games, thinking the same thing: Wonder if there’ll be another attack on other American cities? War was inevitable. Every American was hurt and vengeful.
Deep within our national sorrow—over this sudden shocking upheaval that dared change our daily lives, affecting jobs, business, industry, banking and the future—there were madmen loose. Each one acted alone with the same crazy idea to harm those who offended us so gravely. One was a fellow Texan. Every week or so in the Mesquite, Balch Springs and Pleasant Grove area, there had been random shootings at convenience stores. The victims were store clerks operating their own businesses. Soon the crimes were related, caused by the same assailant. Police suspected a 9/11 vigilante.
A profile of the murderous assailant was not as clear as his victims. They were men who appeared at first bigoted glance as Middle Eastern and Muslim: America’s new presumed enemy. But one of the deceased was from India and was Hindu, his body cremated and his wife, new to Dallas suburban life, left devastated. Another victim was a Sufi, Middle Eastern but not Muslim, shot because he wore the customary turban. One man was indeed a Muslim but no terrorist. All of these men had something in common: brown skin and maybe an accent that hinted of Arabic origins.
Eventually the police caught Mark Stroman, a white supremacist from Balch Springs who during his capital murder trial draped himself in the American flag. He was sentenced to death row and has since been executed. Rais Bhuiyan was the Pleasant Grove convenience store owner shot in the face by Stroman. Bhuiyan was left blind in one eye. A young, attractive and successful businessman, he had plans to marry in a family arrangement with a woman from his native land in the Middle East. But his fiancée backed out after his horrible attack, fearing life in America would be precarious, indeed deadly. Any Muslim would be suspect.
A world without love
With lots of time to think about his attack and attacker, Bhuiyan created a website called World Without Hate.org. He has come to believe American society’s race and ethnic problems are directly related to our love of technology, perhaps reckless. With each click for instantaneous revelation or messaging, our humanity has lost its compassion. Stroman was convicted of a hate crime, but Bhuiyan believes mental illness is the cause of hatred and murder. He calls on families to be aware of loved ones who talk crazy, shoot off their mouths, swear vengeance toward anyone who’s un-American or non Christian. These would be people who are always hostile, irritable, depressed, vengeful, anti social, brutish, batterers, alcoholics or hard drug users, unemployed or un-employable. The only salvation to American society is for people to alert authorities of such a person, no matter how beloved and accepting he may be within his own family. Because Stroman was treated by his family and friends as a madman, he was left alone with his thoughts and perceptions and spiraling insanity fueled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks against America.
Stroman was one of many 9/11 vigilantes, men who aimed at anyone living in this country who they thought were Muslim and therefore terrorists, all enemies of America. There were dozens of similar hate crimes nationwide against hundreds of people and their property such as mosques and businesses. It was a national shame.
If you can believe it, Bhuiyan and Stroman became friends after the trial. The victim went out of his way to visit his condemned assailant on death row. He wanted to understand this man—who was so unlike the Americans he befriended and knew on a daily basis from his store and neighborhood. He had to make the criminally insane somehow redeemable because he needed to heal, not his physical wound but his emotional and spiritual wounds. Add political wounds, too.
Namaste
India has been a friend to the U.S. for a very long time. Politically we share a love of democracy and capitalism. Isn’t it funny how practically every kind of modern American business these days has at least one employee from India? We find the Indians who immigrate here intelligent, educated, polite, gracious, interesting, and most of all accommodating. That is the Indian way, to defer to Western man.
But since the election of Trump, America has created a new set of vigilantes with murderous intentions. These are white men who are just following the punch-hard tactics that got Trump elected president. Trump came across as speaking for the common man, ensuring red-blooded Americans of jobs, making America great again, beefing up the military to bomb the s*&^ out of Muslim countries where terrorists abide. Never mind the majority of the populations in the Middle East who are not terrorists, just consecrated Muslims who pray several times a day. Then there is Trump’s stance on illegal immigration, referring mostly to people from Latin America, which gets twisted into the understanding that All Immigrants Must Go.
Presuming Trump’s election as a sign that white is right and white is might, there is a certain group of white men who consider it open season on anyone living in America who does not physically fit the so-called pure American profile: white Anglo Saxon Christian with deep roots in our nation, several generations removed from the last immigrant family member. To many Americans, those are the real Americans: the white proud pioneer families whose muscle and ingenuity built this country into the greatest nation on earth. And there is no convincing them that America had any help in the form of cheap human labor.
Recently a white man in a typical American city went on a shooting rampage while shouting ‘Leave my country.’ He was shooting at men who were from India—not Muslim, not terrorists. This is one of many hate crimes that have been occurring since the election. It’s like the fall of 2001 all over again.
India is deeply offended and confused (along with most of the world) with this new hard-line, hard-right political direction in America right now, supported and embraced by tens of millions of Americans with chants like ‘America first.’ In fact, educated Indians who had plans and visas to immigrate to America for set jobs have abruptly canceled their plans. They indeed are broken hearted. They had such hopes for a bright future in America, even becoming American citizens, the path many from India have taken for decades.
The world is seeing an ugly side of America, one built on fiction past and present, ignorance and evil racism. People who live here long enough figure it out. The one thing a certain type of white Americans hate is brown people, even brown U.S. citizens. In the minds of that white minority, they have a lot of hate to spread throughout America and around the world—practically everybody on the planet … including the ones who were here first.