Scared people get stupid, and everyone who looks different suffers

Inderjit Singh Mukker is a 53-year-old American citizen who lives in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago.

He is not a Muslim.

I shouldn't have to say that, but if I don't, I'm sure there will be at least a few of you who will look a little bit askance.

Interjit Singh Mukker

He isn't Jewish or Christian either. Mukker is one of about a million Sikhs in the United States and Canada. Sikhs have been here for about a hundred years, and Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world. It was founded in the 15th century in the Punjab region of India. It is monotheistic and advocates equality for men and women of all races and religions.

Mukker was on his way to the grocery store when another driver began harassing him. Mukker pulled over to allow the other car to pass, but the other driver stopped his car right in front, got out and began assaulting him.

He was yelling, "Terrorist! Go back to your country, bin Laden!"

Mukker wound up in the hospital with cheek lacerations and a fractured cheekbone.

Sikhs have been taking it on the chin ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the first backlash victim was four days later when a "good American" killed Balbir Singh Sodhi in Mesa, Ariz. The killer said he was helping the government by getting rid of a terrorist.


Three years ago, a lone gunman killed six people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin.

We may not be the most xenophobic nation in the world, but if there are any worse, they don't have shoes, Starbucks or fantasy football. And every time some proto-fascist claims we're a Judeo-Christian nation and we don't need immigration, we get worse.

Part of that is we don't go anywhere. Mark Twain, a true world traveler, said "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." Since only about 36 percent of Americans have passports, that's a pretty solid majority that isn't getting the cure.

It gets worse. Many of those who have traveled outside the country have never been outside North America, and Canada is just barely a foreign country by most Americans' standards. Mexicans speak a foreign language, but it's one many Americans hear on a daily basis right here in the States.

Asking most people to tell the difference between Arabs and Asians and Africans, let alone Muslims and Sikhs, is difficult, but unless we accept that Americans aren't all Wally and the Beav, and that we don't all go to the First Baptist Church or watch "Duck Dynasty," we're going to have problems.

In fact, they started 14 years ago today.

Today is the 14th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and of course there will be ceremonies in plenty of different places honoring those who died and swearing eternal enmity against those who committed the attacks.

So what?

This used to be a country that looked to the future. This used to be a country that shrugged off its failures and mistakes and said that it was all right, that tomorrow would be better -- because we are Americans and we believe in the future.

 Hell, I can't find anyone who really thinks about the future anymore. The future in this country is so damn frightening that conservatives want us to go back to the '50s and liberals want us to go back to the '60s.

Politicians still lie to us when they say they believe our greatest days are ahead of us, but that's only because -- as Jack Nicholson so famously said in "A Few Good Men" -- we can't handle the truth.

The truth is that we got fat, stupid and lazy. We were content to stop making things. We convinced ourselves that the future was all about the information economy, and we started paying people fabulous sums of money for doing nothing more than moving money around.

We turned into the damn Eloi, and it says plenty about our country that a lot of you will have no idea what that means.

We turned into the characters in Mike Judge's "Idiocracy," where we laugh at folks getting hit in the head, or farting, or just being really embarrassed by their clumsiness or stupidity.

Yes, more than 3,000 people died on Sept. 11, 2001, but that's less than 6 percent of the casualties we suffered during the Vietnam War, and it's less than 3 percent of the number of dead Iraqi civilians since we invaded that hapless country.

I am sick and tired of people who get all their political knowledge from loudmouths, whether they're named Limbaugh or Olbermann, Beck or Schultz. The average person on the street can't even name their damn congressman, but they're quick to have uninformed opinions about the world.

We're in a mess to end all messes financially, and it's because we want more from our government than we're willing to pay for.

Republicans insist we should cut spending and not raise taxes, but have you noticed they never say WHERE they would cut spending.

There's really only one place to make significant savings, and that's in the defense budget. But they won't cut there because that's where their people are getting rich.

We ought to end the war tomorrow. We ought to end all tax breaks for corporations and dare them to go overseas. We ought to raise the retirement age to 70 and end the payroll tax cap. Boom, Social Security and Medicare are fixed, just like that.

But we won't, of course. We're too addicted to rhetoric and solutions that will never work. Best days ahead of us? Not hardly.

We're circling the drain of history unless we change, and there are three things we need to do.

We need to slim down, literally and figuratively. We need to get smarter. We need to work harder. We need to change fat, stupid and lazy into thin, smart and hard working, and we need to demand a fair shake from the folks with all the money.

This isn't about the government helping anyone. It's about us telling the people we work for that if they don't start treating us fairly, we're going to go all Samson on them and tear down the walls.

We don't need a revolution against the government. We need a revolution against ourselves.

And that's the lesson I'm taking away from 9/11/15.

We have met the enemy -- and it is US.