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A couple of years ago, giving a talk at a church in Seattle, I was conveying as best I could the anger Pakistanis feel toward the US about drone attacks, when a woman raised her hand and asked, “What’s a drone attack?” I give her credit for asking, but I was astounded nonetheless. Ever since then I’ve kept that woman in my mind, and often cited her to audiences, as an example of the ignorance of ordinary Americans about things that are happening – I should say things we’re doing to other people – beyond our shores.
My mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit used to say that we’re all ignorant, only about different things. That can be a helpful working assumption when trying to achieve common understanding, but it’s also true that some of us are closer than others to the coal face of hard experience. For example, the novelist John Grisham recently pointed out that support for the death penalty is “still very much the consensus among white people in the South. Black people know better because they have seen so many wrongful convictions and executions.”
The same goes for drones. In Karachi in 2009 I met a teenage refugee from Waziristan, who told me: “Most of these drone attacks kill innocent people. … What the US is doing by these drone attacks is creating more problems for themselves, rather than solving problems. Every person [in Waziristan] that did not want to carry weapons, now wants to carry a weapon, because his children have died in these US attacks. They’re just making it worse for themselves.”
Well, America, drones are coming soon to your local police department. But don’t worry, a boosterish Nov. 27 article in the Los Angeles Times assures us, they’re going to be used only for good purposes like spraying pesticides on crops and catching bad guys. The Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to issue new rules for the use of drones in US domestic airspace in January, is concerned about “the creative ways in which criminals and terrorists might use the machines.” But don’t worry; everything will be fine, because “The aerospace industry believes that the good guys – the nation’s law enforcement agencies – are probably the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.”
And oh, by the way, “Officials in Tampa, Fla., want to use them for security surveillance at next year’s Republican National Convention.”
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where all this is headed. In fact, we’re there already. For years now we’ve been growing accustomed to living our lives under perpetual surveillance, as we do more and more of our communications and transactions online and on the cell phones that we carry with us everywhere we go. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of my fellow Americans either don’t really understand what’s happening, or they don’t object; many members of what Richard Nixon all too accurately called the silent majority hold the attitude that “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
This sort of defiant smugness is not unique to middle America; I encountered it in middle England a decade ago, when I was living there and cameras were appearing (discreetly) on every street corner. The unasked question, of course, is who gets to decide whether I’m doing anything wrong. The answer, according to Them, is that They do. Not that I’m paranoid or anything.
Most Americans apparently prefer security to freedom. You can’t really have both, but even in such conditions, we’re free whether we like it or not: free to live in fear and paranoia, presumed guilty (of what exactly, it’s not always clear), or to live as if we were free. If we live as if we were free, then in a real sense we are free.
Read full article here.
Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He can be reached at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com
The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.
Pakistani voters and the national Government is currently at a crossroad in its foreign policy. The Pakistan and U.S. relationship is at its lowest point it has ever been. The US-Pakistan friendship has been long going back to the days of Pakistan’s independence. This long US-Pakistan friendship is based on the common aspirations of both countries for democracy, rule of law, equal rights for minorities and different ethnic groups and zero tolerance for discriminations and persecutions of any kind. It was therefore natural for both countries to team up against totalitarian and undemocratic governments and support democracy for all. Both countries have the primary mission of serving their own national interests and this responsibility from time to time puts them at odds with each other. However, both countries have always resolved these bumps on the road as friends in the past and they should do the same now. Pakistan has to watch that extremist religious parties have never liked this friendship in the past and those parties now will try again to exploit current difficulties in the US-Pakistan relations.
Majority of Pakistanis are progressive and it is natural for them to be friendly to progressive countries of the World.
True the average American does not have a clue of what's going on, on their behalf half way around the world. When you are as big and powerful as the US. It is evident that kind of an attitude takes place, not of cbeing complacent, rather the feeling of being secure. It is ironic though when your country is so deeply involved in world affairs for the past 70 years that it masses dont care to know even a 24/7 news cycle. I used have young college grads. who I had to train at work and I would always joke with them if they knew the name of the next county, and most of did not, though they grew up there.
Americans are very generous friendly non interfering and absorbed in their own lives like anywhere else on earth. They have made a great country with hard work, and no nation keeps giving new things to the the world than the US. So people stop complaining.
The world has changed dramatically over the past decade, now… its' presumed guilty until otherwise proven.'…hence a different world decides on different laws and values tend to ossilate