The Wanking Dead [v0.04 Rework] [EHFaR]

Being a Muslin is difficult. We should be compensated for the abuse that we endure. No taxes, free healthcare and more. Here is my story and I think that you will agree.

I was in fifth grade. That day 9/11 is still pretty vivid in my mind because I lived in Arlington, which is where the Pentagon is, and my mom picked me, my brother, and sister up from school early. The police had blocked off our street because that was an access road heading toward Washington, DC, and my mom and this police officer got into an argument as I was sitting in the front seat and the officer got really angry at my mom. He said she wasn’t listening to him and he wound up pulling his gun on her. I remember my little brother and sister screaming in the car and we got home and my mom told me to go put on a movie and take care of them. I went and put on the movie and when I went back, my mom was in the kitchen and she was crying.

What was crazy was that my mom felt really bad for the police officers, so she went to McDonald’s and brought them food because they’d been out there that morning. And she organized a candlelight vigil on our front lawn, even though she was still upset. People had all these tiny American flags, and everyone was singing the national anthem. I didn’t even know my mom knew the national anthem until that day. It was a really beautiful thing where people were sad and came together around the flag. I think, for my mom, the reason she did the stuff with the police officers and gave them food and drinks even though she was a victim of police abuse that day, and organized this whole patriotic thing, was that she wanted to show that she was scared too, and she was American too.

In my community, my uncles, my aunts, the taxi drivers, they had American flags everywhere. They were just scared that if they didn’t put up these flags they’d be feared. There were all these stories about people in turbans being killed or attacked. The flag became a way to protect yourself from being hurt. I feel like I grew up right after that. I feel like after that day I was no longer a child and had to, like, be very careful about things. The day we went back to school, people were talking about this stuff, saying, “Your mom sometimes wears a scarf, do you know anything about this? What’s a Sunni? What’s going on?” and I was like, “I don’t know, I’m just a normal dude who plays video games.”

After that, I remember being told repeatedly by my mom, dad, aunts, and uncles never to talk about politics in school and never to share my opinion about things. I remember we would have current events day in social studies class; they would be mad at me if I ever said I talked about the Iraq War. There was this paranoid sense that we couldn’t just be ourselves. Through the Bush years, this was a very dominant feeling. My mom works in a school now, and the kids repeat what they hear, and kids say like weird stuff to her a lot. When they’re mad at her they’ll use the word “Muslim” in a negative way. It’s sort of like how people 10 years ago might have said “you’re gay” in a negative way. My mom’s just trying to go work like anyone else and help my little brother and sister pay their tuition and stuff. It felt hopeful in ’08, but it’s gotten worse this year because of almost half the country approving of this stuff.

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