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Lying to Ourselves

When Dylan Thomas was "young and easy under the apple boughs
about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,"
I was younger, and probably not as easy, under other apple boughs.

Dylan Thomas was born not long before my uncle, Harold, was born,
who just celebrated his 95th birthday.  In years, Harold's life 
more than twice extends beyond the uneasy life of Dylan Thomas.

There is great advantage in living long, and remembering.  
I have been listening to people tangle themselves, most unpoetically,
in trying to explain how absolutely fair and open-minded they are,
affirming freedom of religion and ethnic neutrality, and then trying
to find an acceptable way to say they absolutely oppose building
a community center for Muslims, there where Muslims have lived
for longer than Dylan Thomas lived, because it is an offense
to their fair and balanced attitude toward all religions.

I recall, suddenly, painfully, the argument I heard often when 
I was young and easy, eating and skipping half-eaten apples
from a grandparental tree.  Jews, we all knew, were Christ-killers.
It said so right in the New Testament.  No one I ever knew
ever proposed to do violence to Jewish people:  that was easy
for us.  We didn't know any Jews, but we did know they were
Christ-killers.  It said so right in the New Testament.  

We tarred all Jews, for more than 19 centuries, with blame
for what other religious Jews did to Jewish Jesus.  We
demanded our pound of flesh from Jews forever; all of them.

We were good, forgiving, religious people.  We forgave
Jews for putting one of their prophets to death.  But we knew
they were money-changers in the Temple.  Our own language
was laced with "jewing people down" and other awful terminology.

Today, we admit freely that there are good Muslims,
but we just don't want those terrorists to build a community 
center in New York City, because while not all Muslims
are terrorists, the people who flew those planes were Muslims,
and we are very good at blaming all Jews for killing Jesus,
and all Muslims for killing Americans, and all Christians 
for conducting the Inquisition, and endless European wars
against the "infidels" in the Holy Land, and for protestants
for hating all catholics, and catholics for killing protestants,
and. . . . 

      . . . and for lying to ourselves about what we are doing.

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