One of the great things about my blog is that I have intelligent readers with whom I get to correspond. One of my “regulars” recently pointed out a blog entry from Free Iraqi in which he very clearly illustrates the depth of the problems that must be overcome if Iraq is to flourish and prosper:
One of my cousins study agriculture in Al-Kufa University in Najaf. Her father came to me once asking me to help her in one of her classes. The class is called “Democracy” which replaced Saddam’s “National culture” that referred to the Ba’ath teachings that we had to take in the 1st years in college (I failed once in that class). This sounded great, to replace the Ba’ath twisted teachings with teaching democratic values, and I told my uncle that I was more than happy to help as much as I can. However it wasn’t what I thought. Their teacher had asked them to prepare an essay on the relation between democracy and the revolution of Imam Hussein! And that was not just once, as he told me that most of their study was actually about Shiite Imams and how democratic they were. My uncle couldn’t find a book that link the two together and thought I could find some references through the Internet since I have a home connection and have more experience in this field. I told him that I can’t help him, as we’ll probably need a million dovetail joints to connect the two and they still won’t fit, and that she’d better just say that Imam Hussein was great and beautiful and liberal and supported gay marriage and that he studied the values of democracy at the hands of his father Imam Ali who studied it at the hands of the prophet Mohammed who studied it at Harvard…Yes he couldn’t read and write but back then reading was optional in universities.
You can’t make much progress when you’re busy trying to rewrite the history of democracy to fit into your existing worldview. However, I am encouraged by the thoughts expressed in Ali’s Sectarian Violence Spreads to Schools.
After all, if at least one Iraqi is thinking about gay marriage, how far behind can the United States lag? Maybe one day we’ll all catch up to Ali and realize that gay people who want to get married aren’t really a threat to those of us who happen to be heterosexual and married.
But wait, there’s more!
Both sides are definitely responsible for feeding hatred and distrust to their kids. The only difference is that Shiite now control most of the media and government offices and that makes the effect of any sectarian message they send more powerful. Sunnis certainly did a similarly bad job when Saddam was in power but it shouldn’t be pay back time or else we’ll never make it to a real democracy.
The same thing Ali said about Shia versus Sunni could be said about gay versus straight in the U.S. However, there are significant differences. The U.S. has a broad base of moderate people from all walks of life who don’t teach their kids to hate anyone for being different. Iraq, not so much. In the U.S. it would be unthinkable to mortar a gay neighborhood. In the U.S. there are no organized squads of straight guys snatching gays off the streets, binding their hands behind their backs and shooting them in the head. In Iraq, these things are happening daily.
America is not Iraq, but we do have Fred Phelps and others like him. And lots of states recently passed anti-gay marriage amendments to their Constitutions. Faulty memes aren’t exclusive to the Muslim world. Everyone has memes they can improve on or replace with better memes. It’s all about the memes. Change the memes, make the world better. This applies to America as much as it does to Iraq.