immigrant ban – thetexastart.org

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.

The only thing Americans have to fear is … more guns than people in the United States. And most people with a gun in the home are not trained to shoot it. There are twice as many gun accidents than gun deaths—combined, however, they are in the tens of thousands every single year, and this excludes suicides. Gun proliferation in our country, our communities and neighborhoods, is more of an immediate threat to our security and sanity than immigrants from the Middle East or Central and South America.

Our own home-grown American crazies who have taken to high-powered assault weapons, the kind used by combat soldiers, are our most pressing concern—screaming for a solution. The political argument used to center on mental illness or gun control, as if we have to impose on the freedom of the chemically imbalanced or the proud American sportsman. By now we’d best deal with our own personal national epidemic of gun violence.

And our fearless leaders did just that, by eradicating a late-ordered Obama mandate that would have kept people with mental illness from buying guns. So the insane along with the rest of us can enjoy our American right to bear arms? What’s there to be afraid of if’n we’re all packin’?

But it doesn’t work that way. Time and again, we are caught off guard by a maniac or maniacs shooting up high schools, elementary schools, churches, mosques, playgrounds, cinemas, restaurants, funeral processions, Wal-Marts, shopping malls, apartments, residential streets, Christmas parties, birthday parties, courthouses, police stations, protests, police officers, nightclubs. Most of these mass shootings had nothing to do with Muslim terrorists and everything to do with easy access to assault rifles and unchecked mental illness.

1980

Remember the issues behind gun control—way back when Americans really thought reason and sanity would win over fear and power and money? First John Lennon was shot multiple times, then a few months into 1981 President Reagan and James Brady, then Pope John Paul II. Only one of these men died, another left with permanent brain damage, and two survived—Reagan and the Pope recollecting with a chuckle their brush with death. Their assailants were carrying only a handgun, and the movement against guns was underway. No one was safe since anyone could buy a gun even illegally. Many guns linked to crimes were stolen, usually during home burglaries and then passed down by sale or pawn. No questions asked.

Oh and then in the 1990s the uproar for the seemingly rational government background check for anyone wanting to purchase a gun. Those years of heated debate have faded into black and white memories. A decade later, shooting deaths not only continued (by the tens of thousands every year) but mass killing sprees were accomplished by high-powered rifles to ensure multiple deaths in a frenzied lust for bloody murder. The movie Bowling for Columbine about the Colorado high school massacre and the student assailants didn’t change Washington or the nation. Instead, Americans were more vocally adamant for carrying guns at all times anywhere, any place … just in case. They seemed to be chasing the very real opportunity to play hero, Clint Eastwood with a .44 Magnum—just like in the movies! Make my day, punk. It didn’t matter that every police and law enforcement association was against ‘any and every body carrying a gun.’ They had a point, being the ones who legally wear a gun and are without a doubt trained and licensed to shoot one. They know all about criminals, drunkenness and doped-up delusion, human passion, depression, and how quick guns kill. Yet society just didn’t feel safe letting cops fight their battles, real or imagined.

Holy terror, Batman

We got caught off guard by 9/11 and subsequent attacks like the Boston marathon and San Bernardino. During the presidential campaign, I had tweeted: If Trump wins, it will be because of San Bernardino; if Hillary loses, it will be because she always includes a Muslim-dressed woman among a multi-ethnic crowd of supporters for speeches. That was a turn off to Americans after two long, hard, vicious wars trying to combat Muslim terrorists. Call it prejudice, but it’s how Americans feel pain.

The terrorists who attacked our homeland wanted to bring what people in the Middle East deal with every day and have for decades. Terrorists are usually not highly educated and come from dire poverty unimaginable to anyone growing up in the U.S. An unschooled mind within a poor family and community is a dangerous thing. There is no hope … except for religion. Many Christian families can relate. The Great Depression drew throngs of folks to church, hoping things would turn around … and we would find God’s favor once more. Terrible times often bring people to their knees in prayer to God.

In these admittedly dangerous times in which we live … there still is no comparison between the numbers of Americans killed by terrorists in our country and abroad to the number of Americans killed and maimed by guns and assault rifles at the hands of our own. Many Americans will not part with guns because they have the Constitution on their side. In the beginning Americans were given the right to bear arms to form a militia—probably because in those more dangerous times there was the likelihood a ruler might attempt to overthrow our newly born democracy. It’s happened throughout history and still does in nations all around us.

But since 1776, guns have become awfully powerful … and fast! Our forefathers never could have conceived of such a thing in the days of muskets and reloading powder. A modern gun’s sudden death and damage today is faster than a speeding bullet—irreparable, perhaps doing more damage to our collective psyche than to the doomed human life.

We are the ones with the sickness, the mental defect, the dangerous and deadly personality quirk when it comes to our ideas about personal safety and guns. Our nation’s history was built by our own people who had to quickly size up an enemy: from Redcoats to ‘red skins’ then black and brown and yellow. By now it’s in our genes, our perpetual need for an enemy. So we shoot first and ask questions later.