Putting Religious Extremism in Perspective

Hey, Loud-mouthed Racist Guy on the Subway- know who you're talking about! Quit speaking such nonsense. Muslim does not automatically equal extremist, just as American doesn't automatically mean libricide. Look how few extremists there really are. The guy who made this had to inflate the relative size of Al-Qaeda and the would-be Qur'an burners just so you could see the insignificance of their numbers.

And still this guy, going on and on, like there's no common ground between the most of us!

What do extremists have in common, regardless of religion, within and without the U.S.? Their hatred of pluralism - the radical notion that we should embrace more than one idea. It's "both/and" not "either/or".

Which is why you, Loud-mouthed Racist Guy on the Subway, don't seem to get that when you treat people like they're all the same, like they're all extremists, you yourself are being an extremist jackass. Run tell dat to your equally-ignorant friends. Then read a book or something.

"America Kills" Installation

Artist Sebastian Errazuriz came across a saddening and revealing stat: in 2009, the number of U.S. soldiers who committed suicide more than doubled the number who died in combat. I had never heard this statistic either, but it is true. Noting the total lack of reporting on this deeply troubling data, Errazuriz spray painted it on the side of his Brooklyn studio, capturing just one part of the insanity of sending people (usually adolescents or very young adults) to kill other people (strangers, "the enemy"). He comments on his motivations and the experience:

The counting of dead soldiers outside my studio was long and surprisingly eerie; it was hard to forget that every brush stroke was a soldier who had died the previous year. A lot of people stopped to read the mural and were immediately impressed by the reality portrayed. Most of them seemed quite shocked and approached me to ask if what I was painting was real. I tried to explain that I simply wished to create a physical image that could capture people's imagination, creating awareness of the current numbers in death, war and the infinite discrepancy between the resources and energies destined to fight and protect soldiers at war versus the energies invested in protecting their mental health and stability. [emphasis added]

Via designboom