Much like Jim David Adkisson, who killed 2 at a church in Knoxville, Tennessee, in July, Dannie Baker joined the tortured mental world of al-Qaeda extremists, turf gang killers, the night riders of the Ku Klux, and Hutu Power and Khmer Rouge genocidaires; in order to kill, Adkisson and Baker entered a mental state that did nothing more than take standard right wing ideology one step further. Don’t like liberals? Don’t like immigrants/Westerners? Don’t like people who don’t agree with your narrow interpretation of your religion? Obsessed with borders? Feeling unloved and unsuccessful? There’s your recipe for terrorism. And it is happening increasingly here.

Apparently, before his murder of Chilean immigrants Torres and Argandoña, Dannie Baker told one his neighbors that people who renounced God should be murdered, and asked one if there were any immigrants in her house and if she was ready for the revolution to begin. They thought nothing of it. They said nothing. It’s not much different from what they hear from Glenn Beck or G. Gordon Liddy, after all. Adkisson wrote in his suicide note to fellow depressed white conservatives. If you are going to go, he wrote, “take a few liberals with you.” Please, be careful out there. Keep a close watch. Keep yourself mentally, if not physically, armed.

Please, if you meet someone who thinks even remotely like this. INTERVENE. Don’t blame, don’t accuse, for until they make their ultimate fall, they too are victims of this world’s delusions. But intervene. In these harsh economic times especially, there will be people who take their justified fears and misdirect them into a rage that kills.

We are all Americans. Todos somos Americanos.

I pray for the 381 murdered this week in Jos.

I pray for the tens of thousands murdered this week across the globe – by gangs of thugs or by governments; in ones, twos, or dozens; because of jealous rage, political calculation, the mistake of revenge, or cold cruelty; on the streets or in the countryside; right next door or ten thousand miles away.

As humans we have a tendency to focus our attention on events which are either “big” or “close”.  These seem more dramatic.  The news industry knows this.  They make more money by reporting “big” stories, whether these tragedies are accidental air crashes or monumental acts of violence.  In addition, as humans, the reporters and news editors are as influenced by the drama of the “big” stories as are their audiences.

But all murder is the same. All taking of life is an affront against humanity and against God.

When we focus our coverage on the “big” stories, on acts of terror, aren’t we doing exactly what the terrorists want us to do?  They want us to pay attention to them.  They want Mumbai to be the world’s “big” story.  They want people to fear.  They want people to look at them.  So that they can recruit.  So that they can strike again.  Don’t fall for it.

If we think of the terrorists’ heinous crimes as more significant than all others committed this week, we therefore consider the terrorists to be important.  They are not important.  They are nothing but well-organized murderous thugs.  Preventing this kind of crime from happening again requires a two-fold method.  First, we must build global law enforcement and military cooperative structures which are capable of politically marginalizing and, when necessary, physically attacking, all armed groups of thugs, no matter where they operate.  Second, we must not make it seem that we have to divert our resources from other struggles in order to fight them.  That makes them feel like they are winning.  We must not let it dominate our discourse.  They are one of the many sources of injustice that we must fight in the world.  They are but one, and they thrive when we focus on them alone.

Some people who don’t like using given names argue that they are too informal.  Not me.  In principle, I like the egalitarian ideal behind the change.  But a complete absence of a title goes one step too far.  It feels disrespectful.  I’m not worried about offending someone who unilaterally feels he deserves special respect.  Quite the opposite.  I’m bothered that lack of formalities with strangers mocks the familiarity that comes with friendship.  It creates false familiarity.

The [Mr./Mrs./Ms./Miss] [Surname] option is just as bad.  It stinks of social class (“a man too old to be addressed as Master, under the rank of knighthood”) and is prone to errors of assumption.  I tutor a student who lives with his mother and a step-father.  Before I knew of this arrangement, I might have chosen incorrectly to call the step-father [Mr.] [Student's surname].  But I don’t want to call them [Step-father's given name] and [Mother's given name].  We’re not friends.  Even more common is wrangling about what to call a woman of unknown marital status [Mrs./Miss/Ms. (an honorific invented to try and fix the problem!)] or a professional of unknown rank [Mr./Prof./Dr.].

What’s more, when I’m introduced to a person through a family member, I don’t like to presume regularly inherited surnames, from husband to wife and from father to children.  This is for ideological reasons as much as practical ones.  As I may discuss later, I feel that I am more conservative than conservatives when they say that the breakdown of the family is the cause of many social ills.  Yes, but it’s not the nuclear family that needs saving.  It’s the breakdown of the extended family / community into nuclear families that has harmed society.  Once this happens, a child’s well-being can depend on the health of only two individuals and the relationship between them.  Now that is a dangerous, radical idea!

But I digress.  What is the solution to this name problem?

I like what Thai and other Southeast Asian languages do.  I like what certain Western religious communities do.  Strangers are addressed by first name, with a relationship title in place of an honorific.  An older woman of my generation is [Older sister] [Given name].  A man younger than my mother but much older than me is [Younger uncle] [Given name].  This is not unknown in the West, as it accords with traditions in much of Christianity and Islam, e.g. Brother John, Sister Fahima.  It tends to work in societies which see kinship not just through blood ties but across a whole community.  I also like what is done in some other societies, both more formal and less formal, with regards to occupational titles.  A teacher in Brooklyn once told me that back in Guyana teachers do not get paid a better salary than in the United States, but they are paid better in respect.  In the community, everyone calls her simply, “Teacher”.  This has consequences in how she is treated by everyone from her students to the local grocer.

Can I change the English language’s dominant forms?  No.  Not alone.  Can I feel comfortable within subcultures and in transcultural settings?  Absolutely?  The solution lies somewhere in between.  Challenge assumptions and use unexpected language where it works.

I looked up John, and sure enough, the famous jazz saxophonist and composer was from North Carolina.  His paternal grandfather, Rev. William H. Coltrane, was born into slavery in January 1858.  His parentage is uncertain, his origin less so.  There were four slaveowners named Coltrane in North Carolina in 1860, all in Randolph County.  Fittingly, this was in Liberty Township.  All these Coltranes were nephews of my last Coltrane ancestor—Abigail Coltrane [Thornburgh].  Two of them, Abner and John, each held two two-year-old boys (three black, one mulatto), any one of which could be young William.

Abigail’s father was William Coltrane, who was enumerated in 1790 as the owner of 11 slaves.  Perhaps some of these men and women were ancestors of John Coltrane.  He may even be my seventh cousin.

Location of Rutherford County in 1790

In 1790 Rutherford County, North Carolina was still frontier.  To the county’s southwest, sovereign Indian territory stretched all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.   To the northwest, only about a hundred thousand people lived between it and the Ohio River, in lands soon to become the states of Tennessee and Kentucky.  Its population was 7,808, including 609 people enslaved.  One of the latter was owned by my mother’s ancestor Elisha Melton, a 23 year old Virginia native of colonial English descent.

I know very little of this person, who could have been male or female; who may have been born in Virginia, the Caribbean, or Africa; and who was either unrelated to Eli or his own brother, sister, or cousin.  I also don’t know what happened to this person after 1790.  By 1810 Eli was no longer a slave owner, having removed first to Kentucky, then across the Ohio River to Indiana Territory.  His slave could have been sold to a relative or neighbor, been freed, escaped, died childless, or had dozens of descendants born into slavery.

Eli Melton and family, 1790

My father also had ancestors who owned slaves, in Maryland and Kentucky, but his ancestral lines that lead to them had moved on to Pennsylvania or the Midwest by 1810 or 1820.  This is a difficult barrier for a long-term genealogical project of mine, which is to find descendants of slaves owned by my ancestors.  The 1850 and 1860 censuses included columns for slaves’ age and sex, which makes it possible, though difficult, to trace their histories forward past Emancipation.  Not so for the 1790 census.  Unless I can find a detailed will, Eli Melton’s slave will probably remain anonymous.  I have a detailed will for Edward Bussey of Harford County, Maryland, my father’s ancestor, which includes names of slaves and the relatives he left them to, but as the will is from 1786, I haven’t been able to trace those men and women forward.

Why do I want to find my ancestors’ slaves’ descendants?  Because they are my cousins.  Even if they are not my cousins by blood—and some likely are—they are my kin.  While racial slavery and the legacy of skin color hierarchy helped structure our republic’s institutions, opposition to this legacy strengthened our republic by perfecting its morals.  These principles have gradually transformed the United States’ dominant public identity from racial to non-racial and national.  But this process will not be complete until it is reflected in our everyday identity as people: as families become post-racial.  This may be the way things naturally go in the future, as families continue to “mix”, but it is also important that we take another look at our families’ hidden pasts.  In doing this, we neither assign blame to the sons, nor absolve the father of his sins.  We instead focus on the present and the future.  We reconnect with lost kin, separated by the consequences of these past sins.  To do so is one more step toward becoming one nation, indivisible.

God willing, this realization will be able to defeat two poisonous ideologies.  The first is the doctrine that political violence against innocents is justified by Islam.  The second is the idea that this false interpretation is inherent to Islam.  Instead it can be shown for what it is: the universal poison of division.  It can infect any person that it touches and makes mockeries of religion and nation.  We must fight this poison both around the world and in our own communities.  If we do this, terrorism will suffer not only military defeat, but it and everything like it will suffer complete ideological collapse.

This blog is dedicated to the American Revolution.  By this term, I, like Benjamin Rush, do not mean the War for Independence against the Crown.  I refer instead to the great patriotic endeavor that followed it — our endless struggle for liberty.  Men and women continued to fight the tyrannies of arbitrary power and win victories for liberty and justice.  They did so against tough resistance: human nature, aristocratic opposition, and the institutions and principles of a still imperfect Union.   The mistaken belief that there are cultural limits to liberty lay at the heart of most early Americans’ acceptance of racial slavery.  Even those, like Thomas Jefferson, who spoke most sincerely on the principle of the equality of men before God, believed at the same time that only white Protestant men had the capacity to live up to that equality in practice.  Others, like Alexander Hamilton, feared common people of all colors, preferring his liberty tempered by the authority of an educated elite.  Both fallacies survived through the Era of Jackson, when Democracy fought the interests of industrial capital but ignored more local manifestations of greed; extended the franchise to the white poor but hardened racial lines.  We made great progress in the 1860s with Emancipation and Reconstruction, but much of this was reversed in the decades which followed as anti-American racialist terror reconquered the South and the North too fell victim to the idea that liberty was limited by geography.  Scientific racism drove the country’s first laws defining “illegal” immigration and its first forays into Empire.  Both parties, by and large, made peace with a growing Transatlantic industrial aristocracy.  In the twentieth century the struggle continued on against enemies of liberty both foreign and domestic.  Americans fought authoritarianism everywhere, in uniform abroad and in our everyday lives at home.  

Yet our fight was made more difficult by a new idea hatched by reactionary conservatives, the same type of tyrant our forefathers overthrew in 1776.  Because the world as a whole also struggled for liberty, because we sometimes sympathized with these struggles even when we disagreed with the means behind them, they started to call us anti-American.  They started to say we opposed freedom.  They claimed to be the only patriots.  We lost our mettle when they called us Communists.  We shrank from love of country when they soiled our proud flag.  We abandoned our conception of America’s divine mission because they misunderstood and misappropriated God.  We won many battles in the 20th century but are still losing on one very important front, one which could yet derail this revolution and sound the death knell for liberty.  They still pass off their tyranny as patriotism. 

 We progressives are the patriotic Americans.  We must never shrink from that principle.  We must see our struggles as part of the American tradition and let that grand tradition renew our resolve and strengthen our foundation.  We must fight the moral weaknesses of our country’s past and its present with its moral strengths.  We must stop special interests gaining wealth and power through alliance with corrupt officials.  We must build roads to prosperity that all may travel.  We must block threats to our privacy and our way of life.  We must assail limits to liberty built upon accident of birth.  We must protect Constitutional rights for all people.  We must never be won over to tyranny through pragmatic concerns.  Anti-American developments like government spying and gun control and basing our financial system on speculation may make us feel safer and more prosperous, but they erode our freedoms and makes it impossible to fight for progressive issues.  Ironically, anti-liberty forces managed electoral gains over the past four decades by pretending to care about these issues.  These issues should, could, and will belong to progressives. 

We must reclaim them by speaking the language of liberty.  We must make it clear that progressivism is Americanism.  The tyrants are making liberty look bad.  Liberty now falters around the world and in the hearts of our own people.  The people who act most proud of our traditions are teaching them wrong.  We fight for freedom. 

Those who fall into complacency, who think we have done enough, who are happy enough with their own good fortune and with ours as a nation, are mistaken when they believe themselves to be following the spirit of the Constitution, when they believe themselves to be preserving liberties.   They are often fine people, often patriotic, but mistaken.  Jealous hoarding of liberties by one people is against the spirit of liberty.  As progressives, we must make clear that those who do this are less in tune with the American revolutionary traditions than those of us who continue to struggle to “let freedom ring.”  Through this, we can gain continued victories for liberty.  Through reclaiming patriotism, patriotism can renew us.

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I intend this blog as an exploration of what liberty means to me.  At times it will be autobiographical, historical, current event-driven, philosophical or practical.  I have been told a have a rather complex set of views.  I agree with that completely.  Some may be confused by labels.  I love my country and hate its borders.  I am an outspoken racial egalitarian who is obsessed with genetics, genealogy, and the expression of human similarity and difference.   I am a religious Muslim (I researched all religions in high school and converted in 2000), a strong political secularist, and an unflinching American patriot.  I am proud of my American heritage and how it becomes more American every day through my family’s and our country’s increasing diversity and engagement with the world.  I want that engagement to be an engagement of liberty.  I combine very conservative and very liberal viewpoints into a coherent whole.  Confused?  God willing, my future blog posts will make some progress toward explaining, maybe even toward realizing a dream.

Far too often, I too chose the path of not explaining.  This was the path of destruction.  I chose irreligion among the irreligious, cynicism among the cynical, complacency among the complacent, and fear among the fearful.  No one knew who I was.  I will be silent no more.