Maturity
I’ll keep this brief. Maybe. We’ll see.
Our ambassador to Libya has been killed in an assault on the consulate in Benghazi. The attack was in response to a video that aired throughout northern Africa, a satire (I use the term loosely, as apparently it does not deserve so elevated a label) by an amateur filmmaker in California that allegedly mocks Mohammed. A similar attack occurred in Cairo, but no deaths resulted as security there proved more effective.
This is my opinion. This kind of crap is a consequence of a profound lack of maturity on the part of religious extremists. Of all denominations and philosophies. I do not here single out any one religion or culture. The idiot who gunned down the people at the Sikh temple here is of the same infantile level of literal-minded incapacity to see past the end of a wrongheaded embrace of religion-as-substitute-for-mature-thought.
Partly this the result of a peculiar kind of insularity that does not allow for exposure to diverse ideas. Like disease, you cannot develop tolerance if you keep those things to which you are susceptible always at bay. Information, the daily encounter with differences, with ideas, with modes of thinking, all these things act like vaccines and you learn over time to put matters in context and acquire perspective. Religious extremism relies on the absence of such exposure, the cordoning-off of experience. People overreact to that which seems threatening of which they have little direct experience.
Poking fun at things, mocking things—I don’t care what they are—do not justify killing. If you insult or mock the things I hold important, I might get a bit testy, but ultimately I know you speak from lack of knowledge, from prejudice, and from a similar dearth of maturity. More importantly, I have to consider that you might have a point, that what you say may demand some consideration on my part. At the end of the day, my discomfort over your words, however intended, that have no merit leaves no scars; what you say does not hurt me.
Until this becomes internalized, misunderstanding across cultural lines is inevitable. Tragic, stupid, and an impediment to any future rapprochement.
Besides—idiots—someone in California made that video, not the people in our embassy, and it did not represent anything more than the views of one person, not the official position of the United States. Maybe you pretend to be a monolith and if one speaks you are all represented, but not here, and you should know that. You should know by now that we value the individual right to self-expression. Just as some believe they have a right to issue blanket condemnations of America and the values we embody, we likewise have a right to express our opinions. On anything.
All such violence does is provide further evidence of a thin-skinned immaturity, the kind of adolescent pique that is only important to the one indulging what is essentially a feckless hissy-fit. It is my fervent hope that one day we will all grow up and get over ourselves.
Thank you for your patience.
