Education education everywhere, not a learning to drink

Blog VIII of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

I am amazed again and again by how much education goes into the making of many of us and yet how little a percentage of those learnings do we retain when time comes to exercise them. It seems as if in this information explosion, the sane voices end up being suppressed by the babble of warmongers and irrationality.

The trigger for this blog is the recent controversy over construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. While it is understandable that common public get emotional about these issues, what is truly appalling however is when their supposedly enlightened leaders go ahead and make comments along similar lines.

Fact #1: Events of 9/11 were conducted by terrorists.
Fact #2: Incidentally these terrorists were Muslim.

Fact #3: USA has chosen to be a country of religious freedom.
Fact #4: Islam is one of the many religions that have a right to that.

There is NO reason why Muslims should not be able to open a mosque near Ground Zero. Any comments trying to justify the opposite are a veiled attack on the religious freedom and democracy. Any national leader making such comments should be seriously reprimanded by pushing him/her out of mainstream.

And for those who understand only in analogies, Hitler was a devout Christian who went on to perform ethnic cleansing during Holocaust. Should “faithful German people refudiate (read as repudiate)” construction of any church in the vicinity of Berlin and Holocaust camps because it is an “unnecessary provocation” to Jews ?

PS: Another disturbing trend is when the media is more concerned about the grammatical correctness of their leader’s statement than its politically correctness.