It was my 21st birthday, a time to revel in my new freedoms. Instead I worried about freedoms I had already taken for granted and endured one of the most harrowing experiences of my life -- and nothing even happened.
I was returning to New York from London with my girlfriend. We were flying a week after the terrorist attacks, when the airlines were suffering the brunt of their loss of business. Our 250-seat Airbus A330 wasn't carrying more than 40 people. I hate flying as it is. My girlfriend had to comfort me the whole way to London. Before our return trip, we had to go through about five different security checkpoints in the airport. We knew everything was safe. Nevertheless, as we observed a Middle Eastern man being interrogated in the waiting area, we became more nervous. Our nerves were not soothed by the woman sobbing with fear behind me, nor by the Middle Eastern man who verbally antagonized a flight attendant who was requesting that he return to his seat.
As the plane took off my heart nearly leaped out of my chest when the rude Middle Eastern man immediately stood up, despite the pleas of the flight attendants. He sat down immediately thereafter. My girlfriend was as uneasy as I was. Brave guy that I am, I reassured her that everything would be fine, thus disguising my own conviction that our flight would be hijacked.
The hours rolled by and nothing happened. We watched "Shrek" and had cute little bottles of airline wine to celebrate my birthday. But we also observed both of the Middle Eastern men who had been the focus of so much attention out of the corner of our eyes for the entire seven-hour flight. With every movement one of them made, I was certain he would be taking out a knife. Every time we hit the slightest turbulence, I was sure a hijacker had stormed the cockpit. I'm not a religious person but I made my peace with God, morbidly imagining what it would really be like if my plane went down. And I got to thinking how purely evil (yes, evil, for if you spend years to plan and make the effort necessary to kill thousands of innocent people, you are evil, no matter what your justification is in your own mind. This is not American egocentricity in defining good and evil, it's fact) the responsible parties were for seeing the terror in the eyes of their victims and still being able to carry out something so diabolical.
And then I started to label the two Middle Eastern men as "the hijackers." They were guilty of nothing but being of a certain ethnic group (and some verbal abuse). I knew I was guilty of racial profiling, particularly when one of the men would glance back and catch me trying to pretend like I wasn't staring at him. It was unfair of me to think of them as hijackers, but I was terrified and I couldn't convince myself to think otherwise.
Many have had similar experiences in the last few weeks. Most of the victims were as harmless as the two on my flight, and most of the guilty were as harmless as me. But it still happens because of fear. Fear is powerful, always weeding its way in to one's consciousness, and it leads to unfair generalizations.
The demon we need to slay domestically is not racism, but the fear motivating it. I would not have been so suspicious of the two innocent Middle Eastern men on my flight if I hadn't been so terrified. I am afraid because I fear innocent people. That is not something to which I am accustomed in America, but it is something I cannot help. I do not like living in fear, nor do I like suspecting innocent people. The reason people come to this country is because it's a place where everyone is supposed to be safe from oppression. Living in freedom, above all else, means living free from fear, and that applies to the victims and perpetrators of stereotypes.
In order to free ourselves from that fear, we have to eliminate those responsible for it. Osama bin Laden is bent on destroying American freedom, as he himself declares, and his followers, brainwashed to become opposed to a country for the freedom and prosperity it enjoys, carry out his wishes because they have no other options, living in countries devoid of the freedom and prosperity we take (took) for granted.
We must preserve our freedom from fear at all costs. Without it, we will be no better off than those who suffer from poverty, oppression, and violence in the Mideast. The only way to preserve that freedom is to eliminate those whose mission is to destroy it. Patriotism does not strictly mean supporting the military, but it does mean wanting to see our freedoms survive, and our freedoms will only survive if there is no evil in the world to threaten them. With a weak response, or by allowing concessions through negotiation, we will sacrifice exactly what we are trying to maintain.
I am not going to waste my time conjecturing that America got what it deserved (no level of frustration with a country's government or way of life validates terrorism) or that the motives of terrorists must be understood because, as many have pointed out, doing so would be like trying to understand why the aliens in "Independence Day" attack. I will, however, wave my flag and be proud to be an American, where people of all backgrounds come to live free from fear, and where it seems people will only do so in the future if we fight for our freedom now.
