"Stand up! We shall not be moved...

...except by a woman dying from the loss of food

If you've got more to give then you've got to prove

Put your hands up and I'll copy you."

-Stand Up-The Flobots

WARNING: I rant for pretty much this whole post. If you can't handle me being angry because people are stupid and intolerant, don't read this. :)

I'm really angry about racial intolerance today. It seems to be creeping up... (blah blah blah. here's where I had to remove stuff. to get you caught up: "terrorist convention" is the phrase discussed in the next paragraph.)

When we were home, I asked my mom what she thought it was, and our best guess is that she was referring to some kind of gathering held by the Islamic Society of Northern America or The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. Ugh. Are people still that ignorant? Did the Bush/Cheney administration actually do that good of a job of brainwashing Americans after 9-11? I thought people were over the whole Muslim=terrorist thing, but I guess not. That really pissed me off. Ignorance like that weakens our country; it doesn't make us any safer from the very few extremists (of all races and religions) who do want to terrorize us.

My general frustration with racial intolerance didn't end there. After getting home, eating dinner, and running errands, my family sat down and watched old episodes of the Twilight Zone. (That's what every average family does on a Monday night, right?)

The second episode, called "Deaths-Head Revisited", depicted a former Nazi solider revisiting Dachau, the concentration camp where he had worked during the Holocaust. The gate locks behind him, and the ghost of one of the prisoners comes out of nowhere. He begins describing all the terrible things the solider did while working there. The prisoner is making him really uncomfortable, and the guy keeps saying things like "Let me go! This is inhumane!" to which the prisoner says "What you did to us was inhumane." That line is really powerful to me, especially because of the persistent ignorance of the solider. More ghosts arrive, they hold a trial, and find him guilty of crimes against humanity. After another argument, the ghost takes him back outside and makes him feel the pain of all the things he had done to others: the thousands of bullets he has shot at prisoners lined up against the fence, the choking feeling of a noose, the suffocating poison of gas chambers, and many other tortures the prisoner considers to be unmentionable.

I was blown away by this episode. While all of them seem to have morals, this one was especially strong. It's easy for most us to look back today on what went on in Germany during WWII and consider it pure evil, but this was only filmed seventeen years after the fall of Hitler. I get the impression that it was still a really controversial subject at that time, and barely enough time had passed for people to understand its full impact on history.

This made me wonder: what is currently going on in our society that people are ignoring now, yet will be looked back on like the Holocaust after it's been stopped? I feel like the genocide in Darfur is like this. Terrible things are going on, the government is torturing people, and yet nobody is doing anything about it except activist groups. If governments/society were intelligent enough to learn from history, we would've stopped the genocide in Darfur already, or at least have our government working on it. It depresses me that so many people are ignorant of history to the point of repeating it.

I continued to sit around and watch TV for the rest of the night (what a great political activist I am...I get angry and do nothing about it but watch TV and blog!), and I flipped to an episode of The Tyra Banks Show. She can be crazy and over-the-top sometimes, but her episodes dealing with race, the LGBT community, tolerance, poverty, and other social issues are very well done. Tonight's particular episode had a group of people from all different backgrounds and races, and asked them to watch a series of video clips and discuss them. A lot of stereotypes were brought out, but there were a couple people who truly shocked/scared me.

Many of the people who were raised in Southern, white communities used Christianity as an excuse for their racism throughout the whole show. They kept claiming that it was their upbringing, that they grew up in a small town where everyone hated non-whites and the Klan was still active, and that their parents told them that the Bible condemned things such as interracial dating. That last one I really can not believe. As a liberal Catholic, I understand not all Christians share my views, but it drives me insane when people ignore Christianity's teachings of love and tolerance and pretend that racism, discrimination, and hate are magically written in between the lines in the Bible.

There was also the other extreme depicted: hating one's own race. One of the people on there was Arabic, and he talked about how completely ashamed of his race he's been since 9-11. He avoids traditionally-dressed Muslims on the street, refuses to get on a train when he sees other Muslims getting on for fear of them blowing it up, doesn't allow his own mother to wear her veil in public, responds to his parents in English when they speak Arabic, won't tell the girls he dates his last name, tells people he's Italian or Latino, and pretty much considers his whole race to be terrorists. I can't even say anything to that. I'm simply appalled to the point where I'm at a loss for words. I just don't understand.

In fact, I don't understand intolerance at all.

We're all different.

It's beautiful.

Embrace it.