…Had The Balls To Say It

The First Essential Scary Truth

Thursday the public learned Juan Williams was fired by NPR the night before after a decade as a news analyst for the network. The offense? Telling Bill O’Reilly on his show The O’Reilly Factor “When I get on a plane … if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried, I get nervous.”

NPR felt Williams made a bigoted statement and fired him. Fox and millions of Americans jumped to his defense calling NPR’s action the very pinnacle of Politically Correct thought policing. (Williams is also employed by Fox News and was signed to a long term contract the day after NPR terminated his ten year long stint on their radio broadcasts.)

Whatever side of this debate you choose to come down on, Juan Williams simply stated a something every American has thought or felt when getting on an airplane since 9/11. Interestingly enough, in citing his fears, he simply told a greater truth about human nature in a time when we have been attacked by those Islamofascits in the world – something we should expect from our news analysts of every generation but something that has been locking on Fox, MSNBC, CNN et al.

So kudos to Juan Williams for helping us to collectively confront our fears publically, something we’ve all been doing on planes privately for over 8 years now. By confronting hard truths and moving past them is how you get to be the shining city on the hill. (Williams called out O’Reilly for tarring all American Muslims with the same brush he used for the al-Qaeda/Hamas/Hezbollah crowd and again, kudos for doing the right thing Juan.)

Juan’s statement reminded me of the story behind Husker Du’s break-up. When guitarist/singer Bob Mould called bassist Greg Norton to tell him it was over, the band was done, Norton reportedly replied “thank G-d someone had the balls to say it.”