Your House Is On Ground Zero (And Quite Without Permission)

[kpete]

White and Other Blindspots: Ground Zero's Bigger Picture

Your House Is On Ground Zero
(And Quite Without Permission)
We wish to be free from the pain, which is understandable. But it is not acceptable that in seeking that freedom we should ignore the pain by which we have come this far already.

September 6, 2010

By Tim Wise

Progressive America Rising via Z-Net

In all the rancor over whether or not one group of Muslims should be allowed to build a cultural center and worship space near the site of the 9/11 attacks -- which were committed by a separate and totally unrelated group of Muslims --there is one thing above all else that no one appears anxious to point out: namely, that for any white Christian to say "Ground Zero" is off limits to anyone is possibly the most deliciously and yet grotesquely ironic thing ever suggested.

After all, there is scarcely a square foot of land upon which we tread that is not, for someone, Ground Zero. I am sitting atop one now: a killing field for Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek; a graveyard in which are buried the bones -- and if no longer the bones, then surely the dust -- of peoples whose evisceration occurred not so long ago, and is still remembered by those who have not the luxury of forgetting.

...............

Truth be told, that whole city is a Ground Zero, and has been for far longer than the existence of al-Qaeda, since long before those phallic monuments to architectural ingenuity and big business were constructed, and since long before there were any airplanes capable of bringing them down. It was Ground Zero for Amadou Diallo but we still allow police to operate in the vicinity of Wheeler Street in the Bronx. It was Ground Zero for Sean Bell but we haven't banned the NYPD from around the environs of the Kalua Cabaret in Queens, where they shot he and his friends 50 times in 2006. Neither have we seen too many New Yorkers losing sleep over the inherent insensitivity towards the respective Ground Zeros for Patrick Dorismond or Timothy Stansbury Jr., both of whom were felled by police bullets, and yet which spots have hardly been made off limits to law enforcement out of respect for the dead.

.......................

Their houses, and mine, and yours, sit atop Ground Zero. And those who died to make it so gave no permission for the construction of the homes, to say nothing of the churches that for so long were instrumental in rationalizing the slaughter. There were no building permits issued by those who died here so that we could be, as we like to say, "free." But here we are nonetheless. And it takes some nerve to pretend, even as we sleep above the graves of those extirpated to make way for us, that 9/11 was the day everything changed. Or to believe that we have the right to tell anyone where they can and cannot live, pray or work. Or to suggest that we are the only ones who have ever died, or known terror, and that having done so we now have the right to draw a circle around us, a bubble of specialness, which can keep us warm and protected as though it were an amniotic sac inside of which we will forever be insulated from harm.

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more:
http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com/2010/09/white-and-other-blindspots-ground-zero.html

(kpete, my home is built on a Kumeyaay burial ground)

[JuniperLea]

1. I'm on Chumash ground...

Not sure where their people were buried; could be anywhere from Morro Bay to Laguna. There's some art left... and many cities have Chumash names... pretty sorry tribute IMHO.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

2. Love it!

Yup, all those white illegal aliens with their anchor babies building their homes and churches on our Ground Zeroes. True true true to the bone. One of these days our country will finally cop to it and make up for the horrors we committed on those who lived here before the invasion.

[Ineeda]

3. heartbreaking post..... K&R

[Ineeda]

4. dupe

[Brickbat]

5. I lived in a house that was on what many years ago the border between two Indian tribes; they had

battled back and forth over it many times. Our neighbor said he had seen spirit lights. :shrug: