Sacred Ground

There is nothing so volatile as a piece of land.

To speak of land is to inexorably enter the gritty world of politics. It is to be immersed willy-nilly in the contentious world of space, ownership, boundaries, identity and power; of determining who and what belong and who and what don't; who has the right and authority to decide and who doesn't.

Just as we speak of people as citizens or aliens, so we speak of plants in terms of native or invasive. We refer to soil out of place as dirt; plants out of place (according to our cultural preferences) as weeds; people out of place as illegals or undocumented. And so too we classify buildings out of place as eyesores, at best, or sacrilegious violations at worst.

It is in this context that we can best understand the controversy surrounding the Ground Zero Mosque, or Cordoba House, or Park51, as the building is now called by its developers.

To contest this building as violating sacred ground is a tactic to establish proprietary claim over the land and control over the culture. It is a way to say: We are the true guardians of this place, we hold the keys, we are the bouncers, the ones who determine who is in and who is out; the ones to decide who belongs and who is alien; whose safety is threatened and who causes the threat.

(Paradoxically, this is an Alice in Wonderland conversation, for in truth, in this focused arena of who can claim a piece of the American story, and who has the right to enjoy America's blessings, the ones who say they are threatened are the ones who are safe and the ones who are "dangerous" are the ones now threatened.)

This fight over the mosque is clearly not a fight over real estate but a fight to determine who owns America. That is why this is so important and so scary.

For any one group to say we own America and declare that America's rights refer only to us and those we like, here but not there, is the true violation of the sacred space, and sacred story, that permeates this extraordinary country. For we know, having tragically learned this from history, that once one group is cast as outsiders in this place, other groups quickly follow.

Which is why almost any conversation about land is also a conversation about politics.