So many of the people with who we commune said it that we allowed ourselves to at least consider the possibility that the election of President Obama marked the end of the racial politics that had bedeviled the nation from its first days. Yet even in our euphoria we knew better or at least suspected the truth:

There is every reason to believe that the general election will be a rout. It will have no precedential value because, like 1932 and, to a lesser extent, 1976, there are aberrational forces at work which will alter normal voting patterns.

or

This is not a new or original thought but it is worth repeating that this whole election is skewed by the presidency of G W Bush

We know this truth now. We are not only far from the post-racial period of our dreams, we have disintegrated into thousands of small communities, bound together by race, religion, ancestry or political views, each more than simply suspicious of the other, but hostile almost to the point of warfare.

It is hard to even consider how empty the week's events leave this optimist.

I fear for our country's future today, more than any other day we have lived through. In my lifetime, we have survived McCarthyism, Richard Nixon, the assassination of our beloved President, the murder of so many---Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman among them, on the road to ensuring the civil and voting rights of many of our citizens, the riots that swept through our country, the death of astronauts preparing to explore new worlds, the Vietnam War, Watergate, Ronald Reagan, AIDS, George W. Bush and so much more, but we did so because in the end we are all Americans, and to most of us, that meant something.

President Johnson may have put it best when he told us why we had to provide for the civil rights of all our fellow citizens:

There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government -- the government of the greatest nation on earth. Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man.

In our time we have come to live with the moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with debate about great issues -- issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values, and the purposes, and the meaning of our beloved nation.

The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue.

And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation. For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"...

This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: "All men are created equal," "government by consent of the governed," "give me liberty or give me death." Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians of our liberty, risking their lives.

That country---the nation with a purpose---is no more. We are barely a nation anymore; just interest groups looking out for ourselves and people who are just like us. There is no more room for anyone else. We are unable to co-exist together, and, in fact, cannot even stand for the idea that others live amongst us. We want to build a fence to keep "them" out, want to deny them medical care if they entered our country "illegally" and even to deny them benefits for helping our fellow citizens when our country was attacked on 9/11.

And this disgusting week showed where all that leads. The families of those killed at the World Trade Center, we are told, cannot abide the idea of a mosque---a place of prayer for Muslims---which could be built too close to where the Trade Center once stood, and will again someday. Even among people who know much better---who repeatedly affirm the "right" of Muslims to build whatever house of worship they like on private property they own---it is necessary to add that just because they have that right does not mean they should do so. After all, should they not respect the wishes of the survivors of the attacks of 9/11?

And what is it about the mosque (or the community center, with a small space for prayer) that so offends us? Well, we are told with knowing looks, it is a place where Moslems will gather, and will pray, and, after all, the people who attacked us on 9/11 were of the same faith. Isn't it a bit insensitive for other members of the same faith to want to pray so close to the ground where their co-religionists brought upon us such misery and pain?

If this is what the United States has become, we are no longer the nation we once were. We are just Christians, Jews, Moslems, atheists or whatever, sharing space as best we can, taking care of "our own" with no regard for others.

I am a native of New England and hence, a Native American. The first English speaking settlers of the place where I was born, Boston, Massachusetts, came to these shores because they were not permitted to pray the way they wanted.

By the time my own direct ancestors showed up, though, the descendants of those first settlers had decided that only they should be given full rights in this new land and that so many Jews, such as those whose arrival led to mine, or so many Irish, or Italians, or, certainly, black people, imperiled their enjoyment of our nation and all it could provide. Decent people, though, fought back and our glorious melting pot was born, with millions heeding the message inscribed on a "Statue of Liberty" in the harbor of the port of New York (and, written, it should be added, by the daughter of immigrants of my faith):

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This is what the United States of America has meant to so many people around the world. The haven. The place where we might get a fair shake, where almost everyone is descended from immigrants: the melting pot.

We know better. We know of the "nativism," the "Know Nothings" the isolationists, the bigots among us, but, particularly in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we have, for the most part, known those sentiments to be wrong: that the KKK was bad, that Bull Connor made us look bad in the worldwide fight against communism.

Our President told us this and we knew he was right because of what our country was supposed to mean to oppressed people everywhere:

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

Where are the people who will remind the nation of its better nature today? Even the president, a man of extraordinary intelligence and moral stature, the embodiment of what this country can mean both as the offspring of a white woman and a black man, and someone whose presidency can be traced back to the courageous leadership of the 1960s, can affirm our traditions of religious freedom but temper those views by pretending that there is another issue concerning "the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there" as if Muslims are not allowed to build a mosque until the public votes on the "wisdom" of such building.

If that is how zoning will work, let me simply go on record right now as saying that the huge lighted Wal Mart sign about three blocks from where I live does not seem wise. Most of my neighbors agree. Do they have to take it down now?

Jon Stewart is, of course, a comedian, but his point (actually John Oliver's) was exactly right. If a religion becomes provocative when its adherents do something bad, and its rights to build on property it owns are limited by how the victims of the adherents crime feel about the entire religion, then it may, indeed, be a bad time for churches to be built near playgrounds.

Somewhere in the din of all the hate and fear there was this spectacular post about the Iman who is behind the mosque to be built in the Burlington Coat Factory on Park Place. To read about a Muslim cleric reciting the Sh'ma---the essence of my religion---almost brings tears to my eyes. It would suggest that healing is possible, but, sadly, that does not seem to be so.

Nonetheless, after reading about the many religious figures falling into the same disgusting trap where Muslims are not be treated as they would treat themselves, because some Muslims did a hateful thingthe many religious figures falling into the same disgusting trap where Muslims are not be treated as they would treat themselves, because some Muslims did a hateful thing, there was the shining beacon of the organization which supports the branch of Judaism under which I grew up and for which I am particularly grateful today:

We welcome the planned construction of the Cordoba House mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan. Although we fully recognize the strong sentiments that have characterized the debate over the center, we strongly believe that Cordoba House's presence will reflect our nation's historic commitment to religious liberty

As noted previously, you are all welcome to become Reform Jews but since we also abhor proselytizing, the only point to be made is pride in the statement---made, by the way, more than two weeks ago.

This post would not be complete without the following, which appeared in various places last weekend, but requires re-posting with apologies for the repeat:

In a country whose first European settlers came to these shores seeking the right to worship freely the way their faith dictates, the answer is so unbelievably obvious that this "controversy" is sickening.

I worked in the World Trade Center for several years early in my professional life, and commuted through the Trade Center for many years later after my office moved a few blocks away. I still frequently commute through the PATH Station there and it is not "ground zero" to me but, as it has been for as many years as I have spent there, "the Trade Center."

I lost several former co-workers and my next door neighbor on 9/11 and I attended funerals and memorials for several others who I did not know personally, but who were related to friends of mine. I am entitled to no special consideration for that, but to say that I am offended by people who are building a mosque is almost obscene and unquestionably un-American.

For most of the time I worked in 2 WTC, my office overlooked the Statue of Liberty. The inscription on it quoted elsewhere in this post does not indicate which religions will be tolerated here and, well, thank God for that since I imagine that if such a rule existed, this Jew might not have had the opportunities he has had by the grace of this nation of ours.