This is not the face of American terrorism. It's the face of a teenager who's made a stupid mistake.
I know. I was a teenager once, the kind who made stupid mistakes regularly. I made that face a lot.
Now,
what he did was really stupid. It was criminal, too, but it wasn't a terrorist act.
He made a pipe bomb. Actually,
if you believe the chemistry professor quoted in this article, he made a pipe firecracker, a steroidal M-80, more of a danger to himself and his dreams of a future with all ten digits than American society and its values.
He made a stupid mistake, not a weapon of mass destruction.
It says a lot about us that after 9-11, we were so frightened we passed a law that classified almost everything that could go "pop" as a WMD, with criminal penalties to match. It says just as much about us that we are so frightened now that we are willing to charge a kid no one believes has any connection to terrorism with a statute designed to combat it, just to send a message.
It says we suck.
Because instead of passing and executing laws that address terrorist activity and punish its perpetrators, we're passing laws that terrorize the public and punish our children.
For doing childish things, for making childish mistakes.
And it's not just the absurdities of our post-9-11 lives that bother me. It's also the way we address legitimate concerns,
like this, a Pakistani man filming high-rise buildings that house financial institutions, the kind of thing, we are told, we are suppose to be suspicious of. That a policeman questioned and--after receiving misleading answers and evasive behavior--arrested him seems right; yet, I find it more disturbing than comforting.
Part of it comes from a concern and sensitivity to what has happened to civil rights over the last few years, so I'm open to the charge that I'm overreacting, that all of what happened was legit. I admit that.
Part of it is the racial aspect, the knowledge that a white guy filming office buildings--despite the fact that Timothy McVeigh and his ilk, in an act of domestic terrorism, destroyed a federal building and the hundreds of lives within it--would have been ignored, believed to have been a tourist or an architectural student or whatever and beyond suspicion.
But most of it comes from a concern that we have grown of afraid of living in an open and free society.
What he was doing sounds suspicious to me, too. It does, but that doesn't stop me from believing that what he was doing was perfectly legal and that he should have been left alone.
It isn't illegal to photograph skyscrapers, and it isn't unthinkable that a person of Middle Eastern descent would offer misleading statements to the police, try to evade questioning, when you consider the way our government has been treating its terrorism suspects. (Case in point: He was arrested a month ago, and he remains in government custody, despite the fact that the government has not established a single connection between him and any known terrorist organization or plan.) Outside of a few immigration paper errors, he has done nothing wrong.
We, on the other hand, have. Living in our society, freely and openly, is inherently dangerous. We are free to peddle dangerous ideas in the market place; we are free to engage in activities that others might find strange and suspicious. We are free to say and do anything that isn't expressly forbidden by our laws. We have a founding document that protects our rights to do so. Yet, here, we are, pretending none of that is true. Here, we are frightening children, and terrorizing immigrants.
We should be better than that; we should be braver than that.
