Anchor mosques and Ground Zero babies

9/11 was on all of our minds last week (and yes, Gossip Bro is aware of a few larger world issues beyond Tailgate and who wore whom with what this weekend). In observance of the tragedy, some held vigils, some attended services and some drank through eight seasons of Fox’s “24” in an unprecedented concatenation of 192 consecutive Jack Bauer Power Hours. In addition to all of these things (except the first two), I visited the Facebook page of the one Muslim person I knew in high school to see if she would have any interesting insight from a point of view we may not always get to hear.

This individual, I should qualify, is not a real Muslim, but rather one of those people who had an identity crisis in high school and went all Nation of Islam or whatever that thing is that people convert to in prison. Anyway, what I found was her Facebook status, which was not about 9/11 but about a recent Muslim holiday. It read, “I need a henna so I cn look dumb fly 2mrw for the Eid!!!” The Eid, for those of you who don’t know, refers to the Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan. I’m quite sure Allah would have been very disappointed if one of his children looked anything less than “dumb fly” for one of Islam’s holiest holidays.

And right there is the point. In the age of the Internet and high-speed communication, one prize idiot can undermine an entire sect of people with a few clicks of a button. One status update, one “tweet,” one viral video and BOOM—the undereducated canaille suddenly and unanimously believe that Mexican “anchor babies” are about devour us like the eponymous fish of “Piranha 3D,” or that 9/11 was really orchestrated by Barack “Where’s-the-Birth-Certificate” Obama and his Saudi oil sheik brethren to make room for their Ground Zero Victory Mosque.

But the truth is that stupid people abound on the fringes of every religion and every group of people, and we can’t deal out judgment to many based on the semi-retarded tweets of a few. We shouldn’t single out Christians because a few of them believe that dinosaurs were born 200 years ago as the product of two dudes who had sex; we shouldn’t single out Jews because some of them massacre people while yelling some justification about “getting even;” and we shouldn’t single out Muslims because a small group of them get off on blowing up our stuff.

Instead of getting incensed every time you listen to Ann Coulter or Keith Olbermann, just realize that most people, no matter what religion, are actually just chill bros who like to get effed up. So let them debate about their anchor mosques and Ground Zero babies and all the other asinine tomfoolery that might be teabagging its way onto the blogosphere. The only thing I’ve really gleaned from the past eight years of cable news is that waterboarding is a freakin’ awesome thing to do to your friends when you’re high.

And that’s precisely what makes America so great. We can get attacked, take a breath and start having fun again. Who cares if there’s a mosque at Ground Zero? Build a Pokemon Stadium on Pearl Harbor for all I care—after all, as the old aphorism goes, it’s a free country! And Jack Bauer will slit the throats of terrorists with everything from a machete to a jaggedly broken credit card to keep it that way.

We’re not in goose-stepping Korea or communist China­—we’re in a free society where people can do what they want. So what if capitalism breeds competition? I’d prefer a dog-eat-dog country to a people-eat-dog country any day of the week.

All bros are equal, but Gossip Bro is more equal than others.