It's a Date!

I noticed the following dates on my nifty National Wildlife Federation calendar:

9/9 is Rosh Hashanah
9/10 is Eid al-Fitr (end of Ramadan)
9/11 is Patriot Day

Interesting, don't you think? In a time of limited optimism (Middle East peace talks) and despair (rampant Islamaphobia) the stars have aligned themselves in such a way that we have a Jewish holiday followed by the end of an Islamic holy period followed by a day to remember those who died in "Christian land." It's too bad we can't schedule a day each year when all these religions could just get along, or "coexist" as the bumper sticker pleads. Maybe something like "Get Along Day" or even "Coexist Day," a day where every person of every faith just sets aside their beliefs and fists for 24 hours. One day out of 365 will not, I think, put your deity out too much.

I'm not so naive that I think all people will get along or that we even should get along all the time. Peace is always elusive, but we should try, we should always keep trying. The extremists, the people of hate, they don't want to try and they don't want you to try either. It's the extremists in Israel, Iran and the US that dominate the agenda. They get the press, the attention, and then the small-minded among us start to think like them, and before you know it you got kids growing up in households that don't want to accept that other people have lives and cultures as valid as their own. Those kids become the oppressor's or terrorists or TV/radio show hosts, and it all becomes one nasty cycle of intolerance and violence.

The chances of these three events happening 1-2-3 like this again are slim, so we should make the most of it and maybe for the next three days hope that no one burns a Quran or bombs a marketplace or demolishes homes with a tank. If you can't muster up the tolerance within yourself to do so, then do it for those we honor on Sept. 12, the Sunday following Rosh Hashanah, Eid al-Fitr, and Patriot Day: that'd be Grandparents Day.