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.