Okay, at the risk of condemnation, losing friends and being carved in stone on the Internet, I'm going to be completely honest here...

Born in Manhattan, watching the towers rising and living within earshot of their collapse, 9/11 hit close to home. Quite frankly, I thought the world was coming to an end. I thought I was never going to feel safe again. And I have to admit, when I spot a Middle Easterner even nine years later, I still change subway cars. I avoid them in Penn Station and Grand Central and I feel like it will always be a war zone when I walk past the guys in Army camouflage and the cops with bomb-sniffing dogs. It upsets me when, so as not to be caught racial profiling, airlines double check every tenth passenger even if the tenth is an 80 year old white woman, when no 80 year old white woman ever crashed an airliner into a building.

So, you see, my old world did come to an end and I don't really feel safe anymore and it leads me to do things or assume things that, even though understandable, I'm not very proud of. What it means at a very personal level is that the terrorism worked.

As the grandchild of Russian immigrants who settled on West 57th St. on one side and the descendant of a Dutch counsel to Peter Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam on the other, I come from a long line of people to whom America - and New York - was very special. And I feel the same way.

I love my country. I define my country's uniqueness by the Constitution of the United States. It still blows my mind that the founders had such foresight for this place and such promise in its people that they provided for the ability to amend its words as years brought change they could never begin to imagine. And what country but ours in the history of man gives its citizens the right to pursue happiness? It can't give us happiness. No one can. But it tells us it is our right to go looking for it.

Forget the specifics in the later Amendments for the moment. Doesn't that alone tell us we need to find a common balance so that we ALL can be in the hunt for what makes us happy? I mean, if these people want to build a house of worship for their beliefs and they comply with all the building codes and ordinances and it is a private property that is up for sale in the proper manner, they are doing nothing illegal to buy it and be there. In fact, we can't BY LAW really stop them.

And maybe it is unsettling for them to be so close to Ground Zero and I wonder, too, why they couldn't pick another spot just to be good neighbors and respect New York's sensitivity to the hallowed ground where the World Trade Center stood. Maybe it crosses my mind that they have another agenda like it crosses my mind that the person I spot on the subway might be carrying a bomb.

But feeling this way reduces MY ability to pursue MY OWN happiness. And disallowing this cleric the same rights reduces the chance to show all the people of the world, and especially the young, whether they wish us harm or wish to be one of us, that America is indeed very special, that its Constitution is something worth preserving, that we Americans have a spirit like no other - and that hate in any form doesn't belong here.