Neither Liberty Nor Safety

So, five years ago, a group of Middle Eastern Muslim men successfully pulled off a creative and devastating terrorist attack in which airplanes crashed into buildings of national significance—the Pentagon, the World Trade Towers—and eventually caused the towers to collapse, killing thousands, crippling lower Manhattan, crippling me for a long time (I know I don't count in any real way, but I *am* the one writing the blog), and inspiring an intensive program of control, fear, and surveillance on the part of the U.S. government. About a month ago, a number of Muslim men of varying ethnic heritage were arrested in England for plotting, unsuccessfully, to blow up a number of transatlantic flights using everyday products that could be combined using everyday objects to create potent explosives. In Indiana a few days ago, a Muslim storekeeper was murdered in what police are assuming was a hate crime inspired by today's anniversary.

Tyromaven sent me this. To summarize, though you should read the article, an Iraqi activist living in America was removed from a domestic flight at the request of other passengers because he wore a T-shirt with Arabic lettering. Airline officials demanded that he remove the T-shirt or be removed from the flight. Those Arabic letters read "We will not be silent."

I told this story to one of my co-workers, and she responded that she had "a better one": a woman was removed from a plane, again at the request of other passengers, for wearing a T-shirt that read "Meet the Fuckers" and pictured Bush and Cheney.

That's not actually a better one. Sorry, Pat. Not that either situation is promising, but at least the complainants in the latter situation had some idea of the offending shirt's content.

Any decent liberal human being, and any person who loves people of a race other than her own, condemns racial profiling. And so I do, but I don't want to do it only offhandedly, and only viscerally. I owe the problem more consideration than that, because it *could* be my best friends; it *could* be their families; it *could* be my students. And as much as anything five years later, it is part of what I, as a white American, have become, both on my own and by force.

It's logical. That's the first thing we have to acknowledge about racial profiling. We on the left try to fight that fact, and we can't. Right now, the vast majority of those engaged in guerrilla combat (or plotting said combat) against the United States and its allies are Muslims, many to most Muslims are of Middle Eastern descent, and it stands to reason that those engaged in make sense to look at those groups more closely. Yes, Timothy McVeigh existed and so will any number of white terrorists in the future, particularly if the legal trend of prosecuting actual or potential school shooters as terrorists continues, but that's not where the meat of the argument lies. It makes sense, by means of pure logic without ethical or broader philosophical dimensions, that we would move to protect ourselves from what has in our perception become the greatest threat, and for terrorism against American citizens in the last decade that threat has been fundamentalist Islamic extremists. The vast majority of Americans exist in a world far enough from Islam that the distinction between the fundamentalist sects and the more mainstream is virtually meaningless, and therefore that majority perceives Islam as the threat. Most of the Muslims of whom this majority is aware are speakers of Arabic; hence, Arabic is a threat.

All I mean to clarify above is that it's likely the passengers on Raed Jarrar's flight were not acting out of malice per se—I consider it far more likely that the passengers on the plane Pat mentioned were. The part of the problem that is malice, we cannot control (a theorem I intend to prove as this post goes on). The part of the problem that is ignorance, or lack of empathy, or lack of depth, perhaps we can. Perhaps not. But Jarrar's fellow passengers, as far as it's acceptable to consider them his fellows, honestly believed they were acting in their own best interests, out of self-protection.

What are we protecting by means of racial profiling? Do we intend to keep ourselves safe? Who are "we"? "We" are the most often white, always relatively or more-than-relatively financially privileged Americans who somehow believe that protecting our position—not simply ourselves, but our surroundings and our privileges and our current state—is possible. I remember September 11 far more vividly and viscerally than anyone requesting that Raed Jarrar be removed from that plane, I guarantee it and am comfortable playing that card. And it's going to fucking well happen again, because the world is boiling over with that much anger. The facts are that simple and that real. Safety exists, but as Tyromaven and I have elucidated in conversation after conversation, it is at its best elusive and is impossible to manufacture. Time and time again we're shocked to see that fact proven. Yet, is it indeed a fact? Time and time again, as I said, we're shocked that It Can Happen Here, be it in America, in the small towns of Mormon Utah, in the suburbs away from the criminal activity and ferocity of the city, in our home with an alarm system and a panic room, in this day-care center, this high school, this demographic and religion and nation. Of course it can happen here. Yet the terrorists who penetrated our panic room have not yet managed to compromise our means of building a new one. Can they, will they? They can kill us; can they kill our privilege? Are terrorists fighting harder and better than we are because they have less to lose? Octavia Butler, in Parable of the Talents (which Biblical story itself is an interesting meditation on the concept of privilege), capitalizes on this distinction. Everyone can suffer loss under a tyrant, and the tyrant will himself eventually suffer loss of his leadership as well. But unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have in abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. It is, it remains, much, much easier to make those who are already suffering suffer more. It Can Happen Here, but I honestly don't know how hard you have to work to take away what we have in abundance. I assume there is a way, because I assume it's coming, but I don't know if terrorism is the way it will arrive.

Benjamin Franklin, more of an iconoclast than we're wont to give him credit for, said "Them that will give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety." If safety cannot exist in any permanent or binding way, can liberty? For this, I must return again to Myron from Louis Sachar's Wayside School Is Falling Down. A bird named Oddly visits the windowsill beside Myron's desk in Mrs. Jewls's class, and Myron is envious of his freedom. He feels stuck in his desk, thinking of it as a cage. Instead of returning to their thirtieth-story classroom with the rest of his class, Myron goes down to the basement of Wayside School, feeling his way through the complete darkness and throwing his shoe at the noises he hears behind him. A light comes on and a bald man with an attaché case and two men with mustaches appear, holding his shoe.

"I just wanted to be free," chirped Myron. "Please don't hurt me. If you let me go back to Mrs. Jewls's room, I'll never come down here again."

"Well, do you want to be free, or do you want to be safe?" asked the bald man.

"Huh?" asked Myron.

"You can't have it both ways," said the bald man.

"Do you want to be safe?" asked one of the men with a mustache. "Do you want to sit in the same chair every day, and go up and down the stairs every time the bell rings?"

"You'll have to go to school five days a week," said the other man with a mustache. "And you'll have to go to bed at the same time every day."

"But first you'll have to brush your teeth," said the other man with a mustache.

"And you won't be allowed to watch TV until you finish your homework," said the other man with a mustache.

"You'll have to go inside when it rains," said the other man with a mustache.

"But first you'll have to wipe your feet," said the other man with a mustache.

"Or you can be free," said the bald man.

The man took a pencil and a piece of paper out of his attaché case. "So do you want to be safe, or do you want to be free?"

Myron looked at the three men. "I want to be free," he said bravely.

The man with the attaché case wrote something on the piece of paper and gave it to Myron. "Sign here," he said.

When we're safe—which as the United States defines it means exactly, and only, what Sachar's above description implies— the risks remain present. We can go to bed at the same time every night, brushing our teeth first, and while no one will be able to catch us awake at an hour we're unaccustomed to and are therefore unaware of its possible dangers, and still a car could crash through the window of our bedroom, on purpose or accidentally, the second we've turned out the light. Fuck, a car could plow through the picture window in the living room. And to think, we didn't know it was even *possible* for cars to leave the road, much less move at that speed! When we're free, at the very least, we know that cars can move at that speed. We're no further from the possibilities—in some ways, we may even be a little closer for a while—but it's the knowledge, and the freedom to have the knowledge, that can allow us to prepare for the possibilities and make choices about them. There's no explanation of freedom in Sachar's chapter, because there's no one thing that freedom automatically is. It's the freedom to make it something.

I want to extend the car metaphor here, but I don't think I can. Racial profiling isn't a belief that since several houses have been hit by blue cars only blue cars will hit you; it's not a matter of keeping cars of specific colors or shapes on the road. It genuinely is more complicated than that. The question in racial profiling is about pulling the lens back. Are Muslims of Middle Eastern descent more likely to commit terrorist acts against the United States than people who are neither Muslims nor of Middle Eastern descent? As we're defining terrorism now, yes. Is profiling them actually going to prevent terrorist attacks? Particular ones, perhaps, but attacks are going to happen, and they're going to get worse, because that is the nature of safety. But racial profiling is mostly-white Americans raging against that fact, and allowing our prejudice, our logical anxiety, to become the illusion of action. Terrorism, itself, is never going to end, because a few people are always going to be that angry and that desperate and that forceful. If the supposed war on terror genuinely aims to eradicate, it cannot be won. Terrorism can be decreased, but that involves more long-term, more thorough and considered change and growth. Racial profiling changes nothing on a larger scale. Is it ethically wrong simply because it changes nothing? When it's a distraction, yes. When we are channeling energies into racial profiling that could be used elsewhere and to better ends, yes. When racial profiling is actively damaging to some and completely useless to others, yes, absolutely. And in "completely useless" I include "makes them/us feel safe." Franklin's statement is redundant; there exists no safety that isn't temporary. Liberty that isn't temporary can be made. It isn't being made now.

This essay still isn't good enough. But "If you see something, say something," say advertisements on public transit encouraging the report of suspicious packages and suspicious characters—an encouragement that no doubt played a role in Jarrar's ousting. What I see, then, is an America paralyzed by delusions coddled in logic. And if we—"we" this time being the people who don't want to remain paralyzed—are to change it, we must be part of pulling the lens back further. And that's not an easy task.