Well, Mayor Schell can rest easy. On Friday, September 14, thousands of people gathered in Westlake Center without a drop of tear gas, and it was totally Seattle.
With mandated hand-holding, maudlin speeches, smooth jazz, and lots of white people cheering about diversity, the corner of Fourth and Pine was just begging for an anarchist to brick the windows of the nearby Nordstrom or Gap.
The rally was a study in contradictions. On one hand, there was Archbishop Alexander J. Burnett warning against the "folly of violence." His Christian plea for peace drew booming applause. On the other hand, there was King County Executive Ron Sims giving a noisy call to arms. "We bow down to no one. We will stalk them out!" he bellowed. His war chant got rowdy applause as well.
"People are applauding for peace, and they are applauding for revenge," says 28-year-old Elaine Johnson. "I don't know what peace means in this country anymore."
The biggest contradiction of the day--and the most Seattle moment of all--came during the speech by Jamil Abdul Razzak, a spokesman from the Islamic Idriss Mosque in Northgate. It wasn't that Razzak's speech lacked coherence; his denunciations of violence were among the more eloquent words spoken that day. But that's not the part that local TV and the Seattle P-I chose to report on--nor the part that drew thundering applause from the crowd. Here's the part that turned Seattle on: "I am a Muslim. I am an American. I love America. God bless America."
The fawning applause and press coverage devoted to that moment embarrassingly revealed the shallowness of our desire for diversity. Seattleites aren't interested in embracing diversity as much as we're interested in having diversity--in this case, Abdul Razzak--embrace us. We crave uniformity in Seattle, and ironically, that's the message we gladly took away from Razzak's speech.
You have to wonder how the crowd at Westlake would have reacted if Razzak had talked about his congregation's opinion about U.S. foreign policy. For example, Razzak told The Stranger that some people in his congregation, such as Palestinians, disagree with U.S. policy. Could we have handled that diversity of thought?
