During my first few days of moving to Washington, DC, I sat at a pizza place with an old friend and fellow Pakistani. As we shared a pizza and caught up on our days, a trio of young, white Americans sat doing the same. They looked like college students or recent graduates, like my friend and I. The pizza place was small, with just a few tables and therefore conversations were difficult to keep private. One of the trio, a particularly loud and boisterous kind of guy, decided to venture into the topic of the Middle East.

“The Middle East, I mean, It’s just messed up,” he said, as his friends nodded along in agreement. “It has to be something to do with the religion,” he continued, to which the others cringed a little and reserved comment. When one of them began to protest the bold statement, he interrupted to say, “I’m sorry, we have to just stop being so politically correct and state the facts.”

At this point, I realised the concept of being politically correct might not be as useful in protecting minorities from ignorance and bias as much as it may prevent the uninformed from appearing like complete idiots. Instead of feeling angry and hurt at his words, I felt a sting of shame for him. Very similar to a sting of shame I feel when I think back to my early college days and the time I told a Jewish friend hanging out in my room that he couldn’t just take over my room and refer to it as his “promised room”. Luckily, I’ve made some progress since then and this friend had a sense of humor.

Unlike my early college days and first real immersion in America, I no longer feel the same irrational anger in situations such as these. Rather, I feel grateful that I am now equipped with the knowledge to challenge ignorant talk rather than simply getting flared up without facts to back my arguments. Growing up in Pakistan to become an informed citizen is no easy feat. The country is accompanied by its fair share of ignorance and bias against Israel and the West as exists in the West towards the Middle East and South Asia.

In a land of military dictatorships, anti- Western propaganda and a much detested YouTube ban (I can’t access my favorite item numbers or 10 Minute World History, forget anti- Mohammad videos), Pakistan’s citizens really have to make informing themselves a priority. We think of America as a country softened and destroyed by consumerism and pop-culture, but the Pakistani people have their fair share of opiates that they are systematically befuddled through as well.

Manipulation of religion and government corruption may not be quite as harmful as our number one hobby of actively partaking in and promoting the anti- Western brouhaha. Yes, our region still suffers from remnants of Western imperialism. Yes, the current conflict in the Middle East and South Asia and the involvement of Western nations can be viewed as an evolved version of older imperialism. Yes, they took our hero and used her as an icon of justification for Western intervention when they promoted Malala. And yes, American drones kill our citizens with impunity. But does the ineffectiveness of the blame game really need to be reiterated?

Pakistan’s general incompetence to solve its problems doesn’t have as much to do with Western meddling as it does to do with our complete sense of denial and failure to educate ourselves on the facts. It is our military that allows America to use our naval bases for its drones. We are the ones who failed as citizens when we didn’t hold Malala in the same esteem as the West did. And we are the ones who consistently deny our own religion and culture by failing to celebrate it. Instead of constantly mourning the current state of affairs and assuming it is out of our control, we can take a more constructive approach. By accepting and categorising our issues, we can then address them and move forward. But first, let’s stop assuming the simplest of mishaps are a CIA conspiracy.

The critical steps towards a better Pakistan are to reflect inwardly and read widely. There is a strong need for us to think self-critically and seek out information in the same way we feel that our self-declared arch-nemesis, this juggernaut called “the West”, must do so. Our most powerful weapons, as defined by Malala, our books and pens, can take us a far longer way than we give them credit for. By arming ourselves with facts and knowledge, we can move closer to appreciating the merits of our relationship with the West, as well as constructively critiquing and improving it.

Let’s read, in the name of our country.