Note to the Taliban from Suburban America
October 21, 2001
Good morning, brothers of the Taliban, from Carmel
Valley, San Diego.
I must decline your website’s offer of protection from the
evils of sexual objectification proliferating around our
community.
Thanks to you, I awoke to our daily dose of CNN Anthrax
reports and MSNBC sensitivity sessions about Good
Islam versus Bad Islam, as if anyone growing up in this
diverse society wouldn’t know the difference between
rabid control freaks and religious people who happen to
live down the block.
After applying my own antidote to your actions, a fresh
yuppie Starbucks brew, my first offensive American act of
the day, I discovered that the US Congress was hunkering
down in the Capitol after an Anthrax letter ended up in
the office of Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle.
Additionally, according to the morning reports in our local
free press, my municipal government began frisking folks
on their way to City Council meetings where nothing
happens anyway (except for raising sewer fees 30% this
week). I also read that the Mayor refused to meet with
local Muslim leaders because he wasn’t going to treat
them any differently than any other citizen unconnected to
his campaign. That’s real democracy.
In spite of your best attempts at reigning terror on my
country’s most ridiculed and important institutions, this
morning I intend to write this column, drive my car to the
Jewish Community Center gym, work out in a multicultural
mélange of sweating half dressed men and
women, then move my daughter off to college.
It’s business as usual here.
So stone me.
I then will return to that most irreverent of places, my
Carmel Valley neighborhood shopping center, to recreate
in the supermarket, where women patriotically shop ‘til
they drop in their beach clothes or worse, in their three
piece- work suits, unaware of the terrible things lascivious
lusting men do to gals sans the head-to-toe Burkha as
described and prescribed on taliban.com.
And that’s because you have made it clear that your Jihad
is about the Stone Age versus the New Age, and it is
aimed squarely at the life-style of me and my neighbors
here in Carmel Valley, and the aspirations of women,
everywhere.
While there are millions of American women who chose
to live under Islamic law, many under the Burkha, they do
so by choice, because this is America. And, before you
guys showed up, few of us felt threatened by that choice.
After all, no follower of the Koran I know living in this
country ever publicly expounded a need to return to the10th
Century.
Though, from what I see on the nightly news, you may be
getting that wish.
Because of your succor for bin Laden and his lieutenants,
most of us now have seen images of Afghan women
stoned to death for showing their ankles or buying food
from men, followed, harassed and beaten by male religious
cops in jeeps if they dare venture onto the streets of Kabul.
And, we do understand that this struggle is not about
liberating Beaver’s mother from her shirtmaker dresses or
even about 72 cents on the dollar-this is about repelling a
bunch of strange men who want women worldwide, from
the suburbs of America to the café’s of Istanbul, to join the
ranks of “the walking dead,” as Afghan women call
themselves.
The Taliban website is now gone, and in its place is posted
a characteristically oblique statement: “You step in the
stream, but the water has moved on.” From the suburbs of
America: if what you mean is that you guys have stepped
in it this time, you said a mouthful, brother.
Finally, civic leadership being high on the list of female
activities in these parts, I’m going to check in with our
Carmel Valley Planning Board Chair, the mother of two
young women who are military pilots by trade,
I revel in the fact that right now, her daughters are coming
to get you.
From: The Columbus Dispatch,Calgary Herald, Bergen Record,
San DiegoUnion Tribune, North County Times
Lisa Ross is a writer and communications consultant living in San Diego.
