Tweeting About Mosques

It should surprise no one that Ms. Palin, freed from her gubernatorial responsibilities, with a loyal following, and with enough cash on hand to do and say what she pleases, would weigh in on the wisdom of building a mosque and Muslim community center in the vicinity of the World Trade Center site. Encouraging her supporters to reject the mosque is, at least in some ways, akin to encouraging them to reject the construction of a denominational Christian church and community center within the vicinity of the Murrow building destroyed by Timothy McVeigh - an American who claimed he was a Christian - who committed, along with Terry Nichols, the worst single act of domestic terrorism the country had experienced in modern times when he made a crude bomb that killed hundreds of innocent people.

Mr. McVeigh was not a real Christian. The WTC and Pentagon hijackers, including the thwarted hijackers headed directly for the White House, were not real Muslims. They were all terrorists. No mainstream religious figure in any established religion teaches their flock to kill others. The 9/11 terrorists had hatched a warped religious justification for their planned murders long before they killed thousands in the name of Islam. Few things could be more damaging to a religion whose roots began in Christianity in the middle of the first millenium following Christ's crucifixion. I would agree that mainstream Muslims in this country and others have not done enough yet to separate their religion and its teachings from these evil people. Ms. Palin's comments do not help. Osama bin Laden wants political control over Middle Eastern treasure and social control over men and women who inhabit the Islamic world. He's a classic despot, in the mold of Hitler and Stalin, and has walked away from his religion (if he was ever truly a peace-loving Muslim), reinterpreted it to justify his own goals, and uses the American occupation of Iraq to help him recruit desperate men and women to do things they would otherwise find abhorrent.

The earliest European Pilgrims risked their lives to journey here to create a nation that respected religious difference, something lacking in their home countries in the 16th century. By the end of the 18th century, they participated in fashioning amendments to the American Constitution. The First Amendment makes clear that the government must guarantee religious freedom and not favor one religion over another. Ms. Palin ought to know this, especially if she chooses to remain politically influential.

I would have skipped over the poorly written "tweets" Ms. Palin sent out to supporters because everyone makes or could make mistakes in their use of technology to push their message. However, Ms. Palin's apology for the poor vocabulary in her messages was not an apology at all. Instead, she purports to apologize and then almost immediately likens herself to William Shakespeare in defending herself as if she had intentionally made up a new word or two when she clearly knows that she had made a mistake. The inability to genuinely admit a mistake or a gap in one's knowledge or education - formal or not - is perhaps the most dangerous and depressing part of Ms. Palin's ascendency in the Republican Party. Ms. Palin's currency and gift is her ability to sound homespun and cheerful while validating and encouraging the fears, hatreds and insecurities of her admirers. Pandering to legions of citizens who are insecure about their own knowledge base or education is simply cynical. Many will say that Bill Clinton did nothing different when he lied about his affair with a White House intern, but it is different. His failure was lying about his private acts, not his public ones.

I am sometimes pessimistic about our nation's future, not because Sarah Palin put out a few tweets, but that there are many voters want to read them and feel better about themselves while trampling on others' free exercise of religion. She makes it easier to hate. She is just the latest in a long line of hate-mongering men and women who sometimes get elected to public office. History usually treats those people poorly but it is usually after their corrosive politics have damaged my country. The rest of us end up working to clean up their messes while they sit in some luxury that their followers could never afford.

I hope that Ms. Palin at some point realizes that she need not promote fear, hatred and hypocritical piety. She could very easily become a political force for good. She could call upon her followers to be their best selves, to remain vigilant but forgive and to acknowledge our own country's blunders that have made international relations more complicated and more dangerous. I have no confidence that will ever happen but I do have confidence that other national figures will emerge that challenge the notion that we must hate in order to survive and prosper.

Our best moments as a nation have always been when we seek to be better, more careful, more generous, less divisive and, yes, listen to each other.

Living Simply

Based on some news accounts available on the Internet, about 13 million Americans visited Europe in 2006, about 4% of the population. If you take away business travelers and people who went more than once, the number of regular travelers is less than that.


Many people cannot afford the airfare or hotel rates (especially right now) or simply want a different kind of vacation. That's fine. I love beaches, too. The reason I cite the statistic is because I think we could learn a great deal more about different, less expensive and appealing approaches to daily living by actually witnessing how many Europeans live. While I am not advocating confiscatory income taxes or value-added taxes that are common in Europe, I do think that our quest for energy independence and a "greener" way to live starts by learning from people who have been doing it for far longer than we have. I know that many people will immediately shun this as emulating "socialism" but if we could suspend judgment and labels for just a few minutes we could take some ideas - cafeteria style - and make them as American as apple pie.

To start off, most Europeans live in dwellings considerably smaller than most Americans. Unless they are farmers, Europeans tend to live much closer to one another, at walkable distances to markets for fresh food and when they want to travel, they have invested in rail systems that will take you practically anywhere on the continent in far less time and far more efficiently than it would take to drive. They don't tend to tear down and throw away perfectly good buildings in favor of building 5,000 square foot houses where half the house is never used but has to be heated and cooled. They shop for food on a daily basis in many cases, often in farmer's markets, buying only what they need for a day or two instead of stockpiling food and other items as if the world were coming to an end.

The differences between rich and poor are far less stark. That does not necessarily mean that there are not super-rich people and very poor people but the homeless plague that exists in many American cities and towns is much less a problem in Europe than it is here. Their universal health care systems are not exactly what they are cracked up to be - long waits for elective surgery, etc. - but life expectancy is at or above what we have. On the other hand, their obesity rates are lower; their heart disease rates are lower.


I have no interest in copying everything Europeans do. There is a good case to be made that our brand of capitalism with a less generous social safety net does a better job at rewarding creativity and entrepreneurs that invent things that make life more pleasant. It is easier here to move from one economic stratum to another but the likelihood that most people of my generation will do better economically than their parents is pretty low.

If you get the chance to visit, give it a shot. I think most people will come away from the experience with a better sense of how to live well without landing in bankruptcy court or being perpetually dependent on nations that hate us to supply us with petroleum and credit.