Home Free: What are we doing to ourselves?
Happy New Year. There’s a lot to catch up on since I paused this column over the holidays in order to finish writing and otherwise finalizing my book Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, which is now at the printer and will be published March 1. You can read an excerpt and/or pre-purchase Bearing the Bruise here.
The latest thing we’re all being forced to try to make sense of and/or pick up the pieces from is the video of four U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Last Friday I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling an itch in my brain, so I got out of bed and wrote “Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?” If you want to know what I think about the incident itself, please read that article. This article is about some of the comments posted on that one, which brought home that some things that seem glaringly obvious to me are quite a bit less so to many of my fellow Americans.
“To call for these four guys’ heads over something so minor is ridiculous,” asserted one reader.
In response to my remark that I’ll remember the urination incident the next time I witness passengers in a U.S. airport breaking out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” another wrote: “You are free to think that, you are free to write this column … thanks to men and women in uniform. Your statement shows your ignorance of the service and sacrifice of people like myself who give of ourselves and willingly put ourselves in harm’s way to ensure our loved ones and people like yourself can be free. This also shows blatant prejudice of an entire group based on the actions of a few. May you continue to enjoy the freedoms earned by men and women that volunteered to ensure you never lose them.”
My response to such pro-military bullies and blowhards is: No, I’m not free because of the sacrifices of “our men and women in uniform.” I’m free because I’m free. You can’t give me my freedom, nor can you withhold it. It’s mine by right. That’s what America is all about – right?
I’m prepared to insist on that point because, even though freedom is mine by right, I can keep it only by exercising it. So I’m going to continue exercising it, because it’s not possible to be both completely free and completely secure, and I prefer freedom. Fetishizing “our men and women in uniform” leads to justifying, excusing, or explaining away whatever they might do in the heat of battle. But should they even be in battle in the first place? And, despite their bravery and training, “our men and women in uniform” seem somehow to have failed or neglected to protect me from the National Defense Authorization Act, which since December 31 provides for indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. It’s fair to ask whether the Taliban are truly more dangerous to Americans’ freedom than the United States Congress or Supreme Court.
A commenter on Sebastian Junger’s fine Washington Post article “We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy” wrote: “It’s tribal. It’s not a police action. While these acts are deplorable, they are also understandable. In a warrior’s mind, they already dehumanized the enemy.” I can’t disagree with this; as Junger pointed out, “A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s [allegedly] okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.” We can’t deplore (such a milquetoast word) enlisted Marines urinating on people we’ve defined as our enemy without acknowledging that (another lame phrase) “our political leaders” – which is to say all of us, especially if we still believe in democracy – are guilty well prior to the Marines themselves. What could the Taliban do to us that’s worse than the things we’re already doing to ourselves and each other? And is allowing ourselves to commit atrocities preferable to leaving ourselves vulnerable?
How you see this incident depends on whether you’re willing to acknowledge that the corpses urinated on were those of human beings. One all too typical commenter on the version of my article published in the Huffington Post trotted out familiar tropes:
Radical Islamic men use their own children as suicide bombers, stone women to death because they have been raped and want to kill and destroy anyone or any society on this earth that does not agree with their violent way of living life under their extreme religious beliefs. So why should I have an issue with some Marines pissing on the dead bodies of those same men who would kill me simply because I exist? Well, I don’t have a problem with it. You truly reap what you sew [sic] in this world and when you want to destroy all others, you can’t afford to be offended by a little urine.
Wow. Does this writer know anything about the daily lives, culture, and history of Afghan people, or is he or she just guessing?
I’ll give the last word, for now, to Jafar Siddiqui, my fellow American whose “PenJihad” blog I quoted in my previous article. “Good article Ethan, but I disagree with your title,” he wrote.
How do you, or anyone else, know the dead men were “Taliban” or “insurgents” or even armed and posing a threat to the soldiers who killed them? … The dead men could very well have been the good guys and our guys were simply looking for a kill. Far too many of the people our guys kill “out there” … are not proven as hostiles but simply as “suspected insurgents.” Innocents, in my book.
I foresee the need to continue this conversation, and I’ll be doing just that as I drive around America this autumn.
Ethan Casey is the author of books on Pakistan and Haiti. You can follow his work by “liking” his Facebook page. You can also support his book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Marines Urinating on Dead Taliban: How Low Will We Go?
I haven’t fully digested the disgusting news that U.S. Marines have been caught on video urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, so this post is not offered as a coherent think-piece. But what is there to think about, anyway? What is there to say, really, except that there’s absolutely no excuse? No excuse for the policy makers and officers, but neither is there one for the brutalized young perpetrators. Their lowly enlisted status doesn’t excuse them; we should offer them compassion, but not absolution, for the guilt they carry. The next time I’m in a U.S. airport and the passengers break out in applause when the gate agent or flight attendant congratulates “our men and women in uniform,” I’ll remember this incident.
In keeping with its maddening, self-regarding role as the American Pravda, the New York Times worries in a hand-wringing “analysis” that “the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particularly delicate moment in the decade-old Afghan war.” Well, how could they not have that effect? And why shouldn’t they?
Jafar “Jeff” Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American acquaintance of mine who lives near Seattle, where I live, writes a reliably candid blog called “PenJihad.” In his latest installment, aptly titled “Marines Urinating on Dead Muslims,” Jeff offers this challenge to his fellow American Muslims: “There is no action against the anti-Muslim hate-mongering climate in this country because we Muslims do not do anything to make ourselves politically significant so, why should anyone care about us?” This echoes my own 2010 article “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?” The question mark is important, because I’m not a Muslim, and I won’t presume to tell people who are more vulnerable in American society than I am what they should do. But I am an American, and I still believe, as I wrote in that article, that “Muslims have a historic opportunity to play an important leadership role in American society today” – not only for their own sake, but for the sake of our politically rudderless and morally feckless society as a whole.
I happen just this week to have submitted to the “Books & Authors” section of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn my long-overdue review of a powerful book, a collection of writings from Indian periodicals and websites compiled and edited by Sanjay Kak, titled Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Congratulations to Penguin India for publishing such a book. In one piece, “Kashmir’s Abu Ghraib?”, contributor Shuddhabrata Sengupta describes an appalling YouTube video tagged “brothers watch, sisters please do not watch” and popularly known as the “Kashmir Naked Parade Video,” apparently shot by an offending Indian soldier himself with a cell phone. There’s no need for me to describe the video; you get the picture. “At least in the pitched street battles, we see adversaries, albeit unequal adversaries, policemen, paramilitaries, soldiers one side, and the angry tide of stone-pelters on the other,” writes Sengupta.
Here, there are no adversaries. Prisoners are not in a position to be adversarial when surrounded by heavily armed men in uniform. What we see instead are unarmed captives, people who are in no position to threaten or endanger the security forces. That such people should be made to undergo a humiliation such as this is proof of the extent to which the forces of the Indian state in Kashmir have become brutalized by the experience of serving in Kashmir.
Ultimately it’s not – and shouldn’t be seen as – being about what Americans or Indians do to Muslims, but what any of us are willing to do, and be seen doing, to each other, and – framed more constructively – what we might still do to reclaim our humanity. I have some thoughts on that, which will need to wait for another time (soon). For now, here are some of the extremely hard questions that Sengupta raises:
While the making of atrocity images such as these have for long been a part of the apparatus of violence, the ubiquity of mobile phones as recording devices, and of internet-based social networking sites as vectors of circulation has taken the phenomenon to a new level. We have no clear understanding of what motivates the making of these images. Are they meant as evidence of a “job well done” – to be shown to superiors who actually sanction torture and humiliation but have no way of assessing their effectiveness or actual operation because of the legal difficulty involved in maintaining official records of “unofficial” secrets? Or, are they simply testosterone-fuelled perversities, operating in the same sphere as MMS messages of pornographic sadism?
Sengupta also asserts that
There is need for further research on questions such as whether or not the makers of these atrocity images are also consciously seeking each other out, both as audiences and as competitors, in a new economy of prestige linked to the capacity to represent and circulate one’s own cruelty. In other words, are the makers of the videos in Kashmir, or in the Jaffna peninsula, aware of, and in some senses seeking to out-do the actions of their peers and predecessors in Abu Ghraib? Also, is there an informal network of know-how, pertaining to techniques for torture and humiliation that lubricates the virtual matrix inhabited by the protagonists of the so-called “global war on terror”, that operates in much the same way as the networks that bring together paedophiles and sex offenders on online platforms in the darker parts of the internet? Finally, how and why do these videos leak out of these networks into the wider public domain? Are there weak, conscience-stricken, anonymous whistle-blowing links at the fringes of even the darkest recesses of power (as is evident from the centre of the WikiLeaks storm) that cannot bear the burden of carrying power’s dirtiest secrets?
But here’s something for Muslims to reflect on: a video of Pakistani soldiers killing captives in the Swat valley was briefly circulated on Facebook as one of Indians killing Kashmiris. Sengupta points out, all too rightly:
The irony of a Pakistani atrocity being briefly misattributed as an Indian one only underscores the fact that when it comes to the everyday operationalization of state terror, the security apparatuses of India and Pakistan aspire to the same low standards, which make it quite possible for those seeking to score a few cheap propaganda points on either side to – deliberately or otherwise – confuse one perpetrator for another.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that the U.S. military and security apparatuses obviously aspire to, or at least achieve, the same low standard.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, will be published in March 2012. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Defining terror: Better late than never? by Ahad Khan
Guest article by Ahad Khan
In his recent article “Home Free: Waging War on Ourselves,” Ethan Casey writes about what I know as “the American dream” or, as he calls it, “the ugly truth buried beneath the manicured lawns of the American suburbs.”
As a person of Pakistani heritage, I didn’t need help to notice the near exact parallel between the history of black people in America on one hand, and the plight of the U.S. government’s ghosts somewhere in “Afpakistan” on the other. I am talking about the victims of America’s drone war in the “Af-Pak” border region, home to the folks who supposedly hate the American way of life (courtesy U.S. presidents of the past decade). If we are to believe their advocates, Predator drones are so advanced that they even have their own conscience. You don’t have to worry about them mistakenly firing on women and children alike.
Our world’s affairs have arrived at a confusing point. Wars between different countries, overt and covert, increasingly appear to be conflicts between civilizations. I should not say that we can’t tell where it may lead us during the course of our own generation. History has clearly taught us time and again that struggles for freedom become inevitable wherever people are forced to live with a feeling of being suppressed. It was just such a struggle that gave birth to an America that dreamt of liberty and justice for all. It was such a struggle that solemnized the rights of the black people of America, through the brilliance of heroes like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
It was that same struggle that led to the creation of Pakistan, by a nation of people that – like black Americans – had grown sick and tired of being denied equal treatment in their own society. It is this freedom that we, as human beings, have shown to hold so dear, that it has served to justify our restless campaigns for the rights we demanded to live in honour and dignity.
It is no less amazing what man would do to defend what he perceives to be his freedom, or any symbol that represents it. While it still holds true that the horrific events of 9/11 raised more questions than answers (technically speaking), who would dare to challenge the notion that the USA was dealt a devastating blow to its core beliefs? To repair America’s presumably unshakeable spirit of justice, someone was going to have to pay. A determined U.S. military thus engaged in a worldwide war on ‘terror’. Over a decade later, we find the same forces holed up in Afghanistan, unwelcome and surrounded from all directions. Their enemies (those that were meant to be paid back) are stronger than they were at any point during the course of the war and easily project effective control over most of the country. The lack of a clearly defined war strategy is just one rampant example out of many to show how American leadership is completely clueless about what it’s doing there. But at least bin Laden’s dead. Mission accomplished, whatever it’s been.
As the world looks at its old ally today – they who slammed the lid on Hitler’s coffin – it’s been curious to know what the USA really aims to achieve. As America’s government continues to pursue ‘the terrorists’, it has made that country itself into the biggest victim of terror. Before anyone jumps me for contradicting other countries’ body counts: terror succeeds where people allow themselves to be terrorized; you can’t terrorize the dead. Thus, in my humble opinion, the primary victims of terror are not those that are now laid to rest in their graves; they’re the people amongst us who are ready to sacrifice their freedom for the sake of the mirage that’s presented as “threats to national security.” Those who refused to come to terms with their defeat once, failing to learn from it, are thereby damned to fail in future.
In my humble opinion the Obama administration does know that it had failed, long before the latest breakdown in relations with Pakistan after Pakistani soldiers were attacked without reason. When was the last time you heard any U.S. government official tell the world that they’re trying to “win the hearts of minds” of people on the other side of the world? They never intended to bomb their hearts and minds out, it depends on the means chosen to aim at the target. The tendencies that champion the death sentence as a means for the sake of internal security, favor the use of drones when it comes to external security.
As much as we’ve suffered as Pakistanis under America’s misleading wars, I can’t help but feel sorry for America. As this great nation’s ideology is its biggest victim of war, the defeat couldn’t be greater. The rampant paranoia at present about hunting “terrorists” does not represent the example America gave to the rest of the world in the course of the previous century. Sadly, most of our generation will remember it by the images of a shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist. Pakistan and the emerging Arab nations will learn what democracy is on their own. They’ll take an example in future of what happened in America when people allowed themselves to be governed by fear instead of by a determined leadership. Justice will be sought and found, even by some of those people that the knights of freedom would describe as terrorists.
Ahad Khan is a Dutch Pakistani whose parents hail from Karachi. A health management student from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, he’s a dental practice manager in everyday life.
It is indeed about Greg Mortenson, by Mahvesh Khan
Guest article by Mahvesh Khan
When I disagreed with some ideas in Ethan Casey’s recent article “It’s not about Greg Mortenson,” he very kindly responded with certain clarifications and invited me to contribute a guest article. On reading his clarifications, I realized that, had I read the article more carefully, I would have seen that his argument was balanced enough to include my point of view. So this is not an article contradicting Ethan. It is simply a further elucidation of my own views.
I stated two basic points to Ethan. The first is that it is indeed about Greg. Although his story might have inspired Americans to hope for a better future as regards their relationship with Pakistan, the lies he told destroyed his credibility and provided one more reason for cynicism in a turbulent world.
I am Pakistani. I grew up here in Pakistan, I was educated here, I work here. Therefore, I understand and, to an extent, share certain perspectives with my fellow countrymen. These include the idea that all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by the Americans are fronts for the CIA. Americans working in the development sector and caught telling lies are automatically used as further evidence for this view. Therefore, whatever Greg might have done for the American public, he has certainly contributed enormously to the negative image of American aid to Pakistan.
This idea might seem absurd from an American perspective, but our lack of trust in our own government – with good reason – provides a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories, and many of these revolve around American intelligence agencies. An example is the February 2010 furore over Blackwater operatives said to be employed by an American NGO in Peshawar. The incident was covered by the Pakistani newspaper The Nation.
From a more pragmatic, less suspicious point of view, if I were to donate to a charity, I would prefer to donate to one I trust. If the founder of a charitable organization has lied about the organization itself, whatever his reasons, I will take my donations elsewhere. This is not an exercise in theory. I live in a badly governed country and am obliged by my religion to give a certain portion of my income in charity every year. This means that, like most Pakistanis I am close to and will consult with, I am always on the lookout for a trustworthy charitable organization. For American donors giving money to a charity halfway around the world, this verification becomes imperative, and therefore the face (and reputation) of the organization is indeed important.
My second point is that a “serious and large-scale engagement” with the American public is not necessary for Pakistan to turn its education system around. The only engagement Pakistan requires is with its own self. This I hold to be true for any Pakistani system, education or otherwise.
Leaders for social change emerge from the struggle within their own societies. They do not visit the society in question from time to time, inject a little money to assist a certain project, then go off home to continue with their other, more comfortable lives. A highly relevant example is Mother Teresa, who settled in India to carry out her work. Martin Luther King is a wonderful, American example. Our homegrown example is Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi, who truly should be celebrated much more than he is. Nelson Mandela is a leader I admire tremendously. Indeed, of all world leaders today, he is the one I respect and honor most.
In fact, I believe that attempting to change aspects of a culture that is not one’s own can only bring grief, both to oneself and to the people one is trying to benefit. The intentions may be noble, but history is littered with noble intentions leading to ignoble results. For example, one reason for taking state custody of the stolen generations of aboriginal Australians was “child protection.” Recently in the U.S., the issue of taking state custody of obese children is being debated.
The point is that when we are obviously unable to decide what is best for ourselves, within our own culture, it is extremely arrogant to assume that we know what is best for others who are operating in a different and completely unknown culture. One question that cropped up on Ethan’s blog was: Where are the Pakistani leaders for social change? In addition to Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi’s work, here are links to a Pakistani charity for the blind, the Layton-Rahmatullah trust fund, and to the Ittefaq Hospital Trust set up by the father of our former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Ethan has included quite a few links related to local charities working for education in his blog. I am inserting these links here simply to demonstrate that we do not lack people seriously attempting to alleviate the issues faced by our country.
A problem Pakistanis face both within and outside the country is our own inability to project ourselves. This means that a lot of good work done here is done so quietly that the media – whether Pakistani or foreign – either does not know it’s being done, or does not project it as an impressive achievement. Therefore, instead of idolizing the true, Pakistani heroes and heroines, we are reduced to applauding the foreigner whose impact on the country is obviously going to be much less than that of local change-makers.
Or maybe we are such a media-saturated society, encouraged to pity the less prosperous and convinced that nothing is worthy unless it occurs on a large scale and becomes famous, that we are unable to recognise the true heroes when we see them. In Lasbella, Balochistan, I met a young government school teacher. She told me that her father was a daily wage labourer (for Pakistani readers, a mazdoor) who had always wanted to educate his daughters. However, while they lived in their local village, her father’s elder brother managed to dissuade him from doing so. It was when they shifted to Lasbella, a semi-urban area, that her father was able to educate his two younger daughters. Her four older sisters were completely illiterate.
I asked her if her father was happy with the result, and she replied, “Of course. Today I receive so much respect!” Sufficient people like this young lady and her father will create the Pakistan we would so dearly like to see.
By the way, while we were having this conversation, we both had our heads covered. It is the culture in Balochistan, which I adopt when I go there.
If Americans actually have an emotional and spiritual need to believe in and support constructive, life-affirming projects, their collaboration with Pakistanis is always welcome. Books and blogs like Ethan’s, or documentaries revealing the positive side of Pakistan – and we must have some positive aspects since, as far as I know, we are of human descent – are undoubtedly useful.
However, if money is being sunk into development projects, I would suggest that the citizens themselves ensure that the project is actually carrying out the work it is supposed to be doing. Physical verification of that work, and an impact analysis, would be good ideas. After all, it’s hard-earned money. Why waste it?
Mahvesh Khan belongs to a family that shifted en masse from Indian Punjab to Pakistan during the Partition of 1947, leaving behind a 400-year-old settlement. Her grandmothers observed purdah in India. In Pakistan they were the first women to inherit property, due to the shariah. Supported by her father, Mahvesh obtained a master’s degree in business from a university in Australia at a time when women from her family were not encouraged to study abroad. She has been a teacher/administrator for a private school system and is currently employed in the development sector.
It’s not about Greg Mortenson
Jerene Mortenson (left) at the Building Bridges of Peace conference, Chicago, October 29, 2011. Photo by Aasil Ahmad.
I wrote this article originally as an installment in my twice-monthly column for Dawn, but I wrote it largely so that, from now on, when people ask me about Greg Mortenson, I can say, “Please read my article.” So I’ve also published it in full here. – Ethan Casey
Ever since April, when the U.S. newsmagazine show 60 Minutes and writer Jon Krakauer aggressively raised questions about Greg Mortenson and his bestselling book Three Cups of Tea, wherever I go someone inevitably asks me to comment on the situation. I’ve tried to be careful and judicious in my replies because I don’t actually know much, and I’m not directly or officially involved with Greg’s work, although I have been and remain an admirer. But now that it has been more than six months, I feel some things need to be said.
I don’t really mean that things need to be said about Greg himself. My understanding, from people I trust, is that Greg is very close to being able to speak for himself, publicly and forthrightly. Like many others, I look forward to that.
But I’m not waiting around for it, because there’s too much that needs to be done in the meantime. Pakistan’s burgeoning younger generation needs to be educated, for starters, and to do that requires sustained dedication and hard work from many, many people. Anyone who knows the situation in Pakistan knows that Greg’s Central Asia Institute is meeting only a tiny fraction of the need, and in very limited, distinct, and remote geographical areas. There’s a lot more to Pakistan than Baltistan. Anyone who knows the situation also knows that there are other excellent organizations working in education all around Pakistan, such as The Citizens Foundation, Developments in Literacy, the Human Development Foundation, and Zindagi Trust (to name only a few).
But well established, competent, Pakistani-run and ambitious though those groups are, they still are meeting only a fraction of the enormous need. If anything game-changing is ever going to be accomplished, it’s going to require a serious and large-scale engagement with the American public – yes, the American public – for two reasons. One is that the wider American public is a largely untapped reservoir of potential goodwill and funds to support the cause of a better education system in Pakistan. But, in truth, that goodwill and those funds might not even be necessary, if only Pakistan’s own substantial resources could be properly mobilized.
This is the second and much more important reason the American public must be engaged: The destructive and sinister geopolitical dance of death in which America and Pakistan have trapped themselves and each other is draining material resources, emotional energy, political wherewithal, and attention from urgent human needs. And if the two countries’ governments won’t take the lead in either extricating themselves or working together constructively and with mutual respect toward positive shared goals, then it’s up to private citizens to do that.
This means you and me. And this is where I believe Greg Mortenson has shown real leadership, almost regardless of the truth behind the 60 Minutes allegations. Before the scandal, Three Cups of Tea was more than a bestseller; it was almost a talisman for millions of Americans who wanted to believe not just that girls in remote parts of Pakistan could be educated, but that human beings – all of us – could be better than we apparently are. The last decade-plus has been such a dark time for Pakistanis, Americans, and everyone else, that we desperately crave a constructive and life-affirming project to believe in and support.
Three Cups of Tea met that emotional and spiritual need. And before you retort that Greg’s alleged falsifications undermine the book’s intentions, consider that the need is still just as real regardless. If it is the case that Greg – and his co-author David Oliver Relin, who to his shame has said nothing that I’m aware of since the scandal broke – made stuff up, one thing that most certainly does not imply is that the better world Greg helped us hope for is either impossible or unworthy of our effort. If you have ever heard Greg speak to a student audience, as I did at Texas Christian University in January 2011, then you know how desperately hungry young Americans are for something positive to believe in.
Zarqa Nawaz, writer-producer of the acclaimed CBC show Little Mosque on the Prairie, at the Building Bridges of Peace conference, Chicago, October 29, 2011. Photo by Aasil Ahmad.
The catch is that reading a book or hearing an inspiring speech is only a first step, not an end in itself. Admiring Greg Mortenson, or anyone else, achieves exactly nothing unless it inspires us to do something ourselves. As Tracy Kidder puts it in Mountains Beyond Mountains, an analogous book about an analogous figure, Dr. Paul Farmer, such people force us to redefine the meaning of the phrase “doing one’s best.” (I addressed similar issues of how Farmer’s work is not the be-all and end-all of what needs to be done in Haiti at an October 15 fundraiser for the Colorado Haiti Project. You can read the text of that speech here.)
And just as it’s unfair and a cop-out to put all the pressure and responsibility on one person to do things we’re not willing to do ourselves, so to demonize that person for failing to be perfect is a corrosive avoidance of our own potential and duty to make ourselves useful. The question Greg’s failures and flaws should be forcing each of us to ask is: “What am I doing?”
Stay tuned for more from me on this topic, including an article about the Building Bridges of Peace conference held October 28 and 29 in Chicago. I moderated a panel at the conference that included Greg’s mother, Jerene Mortenson, and I saw there a rare mixed group of Muslims and non-Muslims, Pakistanis and Americans, meeting in nearly equal numbers, in an encouraging spirit of shared purpose.
Ethan Casey’s book Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti will be published in March 2012. He is also the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He is currently planning a book of topical travel with the working title Home Free: An American Road Trip, for which he will travel around the United States during 2012. You can join his Facebook page or contact him directly.
Home Free: In the Heart of the American Heartland
Hi from Martinsville! October 23, 2011
Martinsville, Indiana was minding its own business when I showed up there, and I’m sure that my having come and gone will make no difference whatsover in the lives and worries of its denizens. I came here looking for a typical Midwestern small town, and I guess I found one.
On my first pass through the quiet downtown on a pleasant autumn Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t find a diner that was open. I found a few diners around the courthouse square, but they weren’t open. Had they gone out of business, or were Martinsvillians still in church and/or at home watching football? I drove out of town and around on Highway 37, past the new Martinsville High School (“Home of the Artesians” – Martinsville bills itself as the “City of Mineral Water” as well as, charmingly, the “Gateway to Beautiful Southern Indiana”), the Wal-Mart, and the inevitable strip mall with the usual fast-food purveyers.
I thought I had left that sort of detritus behind in Indianapolis, but no such luck. So I came back through downtown and found The Olde Northside Bar & Grille, where I ordered the least unhealthy item on the limited menu, a breaded chicken sandwich, and a salad, from a very polite young man in a football jersey, backwards baseball cap, and blond pony tail. The TV in the bar was showing a NASCAR race somewhere in Florida.
I was in Indianapolis to take part in a panel discussion addressing the question “Is Pakistan a problem that needs to be solved?” The short version of my answer was that it depends on your premises and point of view – many Pakistanis, I suggested, see America as a problem – and I added something that I seek out opportunities to say: that security and freedom are antithetical, and that I prefer freedom. There’s a Pakistani community in almost every city in America, as well as well-meaning Americans who are concerned about the collision course the two countries seem to be on, and I have things to say about that, so I show up whenever I think I can add something useful to a necessary conversation.
But a side effect of the kind of traveling I’m doing too much of these days is that I get frustratingly brief glimpses of many different parts of America. And I want to emphasize that they are different. Bouncing around among airports, where only the kitsch versions of American cultures are available as you sit around waiting or rush to your gate, is a depressing and severely distorted way to see America. The real America, as distinct from the America you see on TV, is a vast and various country. In my books about Pakistan and Haiti I’ve made it a point of pride to experience and portray those societies at ground level, and I insist on doing the same in my planned American road trip book. As my colleague and friend Tony Davis memorably said to me years ago, on a hotel rooftop on the Thai-Burma border, “There’s no substitute for the sniff on the ground.” Surely that’s as true of America as of any other country.
Thus all I’m in a position to tell you so far about Martinsville, Indiana in particular is that I can’t tell you much about it, because I haven’t spent enough time there. Perhaps I’ll return next fall for my book and get to know it better. For now, I’m using Martinsville as a stand-in for thousands of similar towns all over the huge, ill-defined region known as the Midwest or the heartland. I grew up in such a town. I suppose such all-white towns (Martinsville’s official website says 98.62% of its 11,698 citizens are white) are what Sarah Palin meant when she coined the term “the real America” during the 2008 presidential campaign. I object to Sarah Palin’s definition of that phrase, but the demographic she was pandering to and exploiting must be respected and reckoned with, not scorned and dismissed.
It’s all too easy to be patronizing or dismissive of a place where the roadside signs read “Hall’s School of Gun Instruction and Shooting” and “Abounding Grace Worship Center” and “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” (this one courtesy of the Morgan County Beef Cattle Association). It’s easy, that is, if you live far from such a place, as I do. I also live far from Pakistan and Haiti, and I go out of my way to respect and try to understand those societies, so – baffling though much of their culture and worldview might be to me – I owe no less to the many Martinsvilles scattered around America. It helps that I do in fact come from more or less that culture; it’s familiar to me, though I’ve been far away from it for many years. It’s also helpful that I’m temperamentally disinclined to do anything that’s easy (“Why do you always have to do things the hard way?” my father once complained).
One of my favorite experiences in all my visits to Pakistan is when I sat in the general enclosure – the cheap seats – to watch a one-day cricket match between Pakistan and South Africa at Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore in 2003; I wrote about it in Alive and Well in Pakistan. A stern-looking and devout young man name Mohammed Faisal befriended me that day, explaining the niceties of cricket to me and protecting me from annoying rowdies. He had come that day from a village two hours away, with two dozen or so friends in the back of a Toyota pickup truck. “Maybe I will come to your village sometime, if that’s all right,” I said to him at the end of the match.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “We would be honored. You’re not afraid of coming to a village where almost everyone is Muslim?”
“No, I’m not afraid,” I told him. “Should I be?”
Mohammed Faisal and his friends all laughed good-naturedly when I said this. And it’s true that I shouldn’t be afraid, because living in fear is dreary and demoralizing and unworthy of human dignity. And most of the time, it turns out there’s nothing to fear anyway. I’m confident that this is as true of the rural American Midwest as of the rural Punjab in Pakistan.
You can support Ethan Casey’s book Home Free: An American Road Trip by pre-purchasing it for $19.95 per copy plus $3.95 shipping, and it will be shipped to you as soon as it’s published sometime in 2013:
Pakistan, Palestine, and the USA: In search of common humanity
I woke up this morning to the news that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of supporting the insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul last week. The New York Times called it “the most serious charge that the United States has leveled against Pakistan in the decade that America has been at war in Afghanistan.”
The geopolitics of such matters are analyzed ad nauseum by Very Intelligent People in think tanks from Washington to Islamabad. The careerist participants in that debate are largely talking past each other, because each of them starts from the tendentious premise that the state that represents his or her society is the one that’s in the right. I don’t intend to contribute to that tedious and largely pointless conversation. I intend to do an end run around it, by reminding myself and anyone who might read this of our shared humanity.
Part of the problem is that both Pakistan and America are hyper-political cultures that, for historical and ideological reasons, both suffer from a damaging tendency to conflate the society with the state. Hence the unexamined terms “the United States” and “Pakistan” – the impoverished vocabulary of conventional journalism – in the quote above from the New York Times. What is “the United States”? What is “Pakistan”? To what version of these notional entities do I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, owe allegiance? Am I, as an American, or you, as a Pakistani, required or entitled to make excuses for things “the United States” or “Pakistan” do that we know to be wrong? Are we required always to support and excuse “us” against “them,” as though societies were necessarily rivals, like football teams?
This sort of thing has gotten much worse, and the stakes much higher, in recent years, but in truth it’s nothing new. Way back in 1767, Samuel Johnson observed that
In a time of war the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves, and ill of the enemy. At this time the task of news-writers is easy; they have nothing to do but to tell that the battle is expected, and afterwards that a battle has been fought, in which we and our friends, whether conquering or conquered, did all, and our enemies did nothing. Scarcely any thing awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails in the intermission of action to tell how the enemies murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.
In other words, don’t believe what you read in the papers. I began as a political journalist – a writer of news – like any other, but quickly became dissatisfied with the constraints and conventions of that kind of writing. It’s the opposite of poetry, in the sense that it systematically squeezes meaning out of language by resorting habitually to cant and to glib phrases like “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” (Haiti), “Himalayan kingdom” (Nepal), “Muslim separatist insurgency” (Kashmir). George Orwell would have – did have – a lot to say about phrases like those, whose purpose is not to enhance understanding but to disable thinking and human sympathy by pushing emotive buttons.
My personal declaration of independence from the treadmill of such intellectually and morally impoverished language was my 2004 book Alive and Well in Pakistan, whose title as well as form – first-person nonfiction narrative, following role models like Graham Greene and Paul Theroux – are acts of intentional resistance. Resistance is anything but futile; it is hard but necessary work that we must do in order to maintain our humanity.
But resistance to the states that presume to represent our societies, and to the propaganda organs that presume to define the terms of our conversation, is only the first step. The long-term task is to maintain our use of language at a level that enhances understanding, in both the intellectual and the empathetic sense. The kindest review of Alive and Well in Pakistan was by Alex Spillius in The Daily Telegraph, who wrote that “The author’s real journey is a search for common humanity.” What “the media” would define for us as “the other” is not other at all; we’re all human beings, all in it together. We may not properly understand or agree with each other, but that only means that we need to work all the harder to find common ground, and then to hold it against the forces of division and enmity.
But just as it won’t do simply to blame the putative other side, blaming “the media” is an evasion and a cop-out. The ultimate responsibility lies in each and all of us. If you don’t like or believe what you’re told or what you see on television, do the work of reading and of joining the conversation. We can joke ruefully about how people don’t read books anymore, how we’re all too distracted to take the time to understand or care, but the solution is to make the time. There’s no more urgent task.
Is this post, then, a plug for my own books? Sure it is. I wouldn’t have written them if I didn’t believe that they do some of what needs to be done. And my occasional writings, my “blog” and my columns in Dawn, are a running addendum to my books. But my writings are only a starting point, and only one of many. If you’re an American and you want to understand Pakistan, read the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa or Mohsin Hamid. To understand what the most vulnerable immigrants to the United States endure, read the Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant memoir Brother, I’m Dying.
Meanwhile, in New York, Palestine has formally requested membership in the United Nations, and starting today you’re going to be asked to acquiesce in what “the United States” thinks about that. As a very partial antidote, maybe a starting point to thinking about it differently, I ask you to read my article “Israel and the Distortion of American Politics,” which I wrote last May after the deadly attack on the flotilla that was trying to deliver relief supplies to the Gaza Strip.
Don’t excuse yourself. And, to begin with, refuse to accept at face value whatever you read in the New York Times or hear on TV about what “the United States” – the state – accuses “Pakistan” – the state – of doing or abetting. The stakes are too high, and we’re all responsible for the damage that results from misunderstanding and mutual suspicion.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) andOvertaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His next book, Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti, will be published in March 2012. He lives in Seattle. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
After Ten Years, Walking Forward Together
I was asked to write the following article for the newsletter of the New York-New Jersey chapter of APPNA, to mark the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. An installment of my weekly Dawn column, “A long 10 years,” also marks the anniversary.
In 2004 I had the privilege of spending several days in Haiti with Dr. Paul Farmer, the celebrated Harvard Medical School professor and co-founder of Partners in Health. He told me then what an illiterate Haitian peasant woman had said to him in his apartment in Boston on September 11, 2001: “Poor [Americans], now you’re going to have to eat your own misery too.”
“I thought a lot about what she said,” Farmer told me, “and there are many ways to interpret it. It was obviously sincere sympathy for us, but the point she was making was that this is the way the rest of the world is: always subject to hazard and danger and violence, and your country’s been largely spared that. … I never asked her, ‘Is this what you meant?’ I know that’s what she meant.”
Aung Zaw, an exiled Burmese journalist living in Thailand, had said much the same thing days after the attacks, in an article I reprinted in a book. “If Americans want to feel safe again in their own country,” he wrote,
they must begin to understand the insecurity many feel in theirs. More importantly, they must examine their nation’s policies vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and ask themselves honestly if these policies have contributed in some way to this insecurity. Now that its own worst fears have been realized, America can no longer afford to ignore the fears of others.
The kindest, and also the most helpful, way to understand the anger, bigotry and confusion in post-9/11 America is to say that white Americans are on a steep learning curve about the world and our place in it. I use that line often in my writing and public speaking. Truth be told, all people are on a learning curve – learning to respect and make allowances for each other, learning to lay aside bitterness and a victim mentality, however justified these might be. Sometimes, what’s justified and what’s useful are not the same.
Pakistanis understand the point that Aung Zaw and the Haitian woman were making, because you and your country of origin have lived its truth. And this elucidates something else I’ve been saying for a while: that Pakistanis and other Muslims are in a position to play a valuable leadership role in today’s America. To be sure, APPNA members especially are already leaders within the Pakistani-American community; but what I mean is that your leadership is needed even more urgently in the wider American society. Kindly see my articles “Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?”, published last October on my own www.ethancasey.com website, and “Pakistan & America Both Need APPNA’s Leadership,” in the summer 2011 APPNA Journal.
I was asked to write this article to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I prefer to do so by looking more ahead than back. What can we do now, after a decade of damage has been done? This is where you come in, as Pakistanis who are also Americans, and as Pakistani-American community leaders who are also respected professionals responsible for the health of Americans of all backgrounds. It really is true, as a teenager told us at a mosque in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey last October, that the principles of sharia and the principles on which the United States was founded are compatible to the point of being nearly identical. To say this in so many words might frighten Americans who are ignorant and fearful of Islam and Muslims, but there are other ways to say it. And the prescription for what ails America is a heavy dosage of such principles.
Many Pakistani-Americans I know talk about how they feel a need to “give back” to Pakistan out of duty and gratitude, and similarly to “give back” to America as the country that has welcomed them and allowed them to thrive. I would go beyond that and say that America needs you. My friend Dr. Farzana Naqvi of Irvine, California put it well when I asked what had prompted her to lead one of the first groups of volunteer medical professionals (from a range of ethnic and religious backgrounds) to Haiti after the earthquake: “I got a call, and I was told they needed a physician, and would I go. So the fact that I was needed was, I think, the reason I went. If somebody needs you to do what you are able to do, I think that’s reason enough to do it!”
I’ll end by reiterating something I said in my APPNA Journal article: that, inshallah, I will continue walking the walk with you. I know it’s helpful to Pakistani-Americans to have outspoken and/or well-positioned gora allies, and this is one way I’m trying to make myself useful. On September 11, I’m scheduled to be in Milwaukee. I’m sure that, very appropriately, there will be a moment of silence at the Brewers-Phillies baseball game I’ll be attending that day with teenagers from the Pakistani community. More interesting to me, though – because it’s forward-looking and constructive – is that I’ll be in Milwaukee at the invitation of the local APPNA chapter, to speak to non-Pakistani Wisconsinites at a bookstore and a high school.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Life in the Context of Haiti. Web:www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
“What’s a Drone Attack?”: A Statement
I write a weekly column on the website of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. The latest installment, titled “Drone attacks are wrong and cowardly, regardless” and published Tuesday, July 19, has drawn far more readers and comments than any other. (It was republished on the Huffington Post, in the hopes of reaching an American readership, as “Pakistan: Drone Attacks Are Wrong, Regardless.”) I plan to write a column-length follow-up next week, but in the meantime I want to say some things.
The subject is too urgent and important for any of us to indulge in the predictable point-scoring and recriminations that are evident in many of the comments on my article. “He just wanted to sell his book,” alleged one commenter. Well, yes, I did and do – wouldn’t you, if you had written a book? – but believe me, I don’t do any of this for the money. It’s not about me or my writing, but I take the range of comments on my article as discouragingly representative. We urgently need to be having a much more robust and intelligent debate.
In order to have a debate, first we need to know what exactly it is we’re debating. The most urgent need is simply for more Americans to know that the drone attacks are happening. One of the most poignant messages I’ve received this week was from Tayyab Qader, who wrote:
Thank you for publishing the fact that drone attacks in Pakistan are killing innocent people and are counterproductive. They must be stopped before it becomes too late. I would very much appreciate if you could also publish this in some of the mainstream U.S. media to bring this to the attention of U.S. public.
That’s easier said than done, given the dreadful state of U.S. media and the many distractions Americans face. These range from the trivial (the usual insipid popular culture) to the earth-shaking (millions losing jobs and homes). But Americans need to know what’s being done in our name and the effects that it’s having, both on the ground and on Pakistani public opinion. As I’ve said many times to audiences and in previous writings, I believe strongly that trying to get Fox News, CNN, or “even” the New York Times to report more fairly and helpfully on Pakistan is largely a waste of effort.
The alternative is a grassroots campaign – “taking it to the people” through the Internet and in-person gatherings. Those of you who have been following my work, or working with me, know that this is what I’ve been advocating and doing. We should be doing it on a much bigger scale. If you agree, then please contact me and let’s do it together. If we do, then fewer Americans will ask the basic question that a woman at a Seattle church once asked me: “What’s a drone attack?”
Another message I received after my Dawn article was published was from a retired U.S. military officer, someone I like and consider a friendly acquaintance, who wrote:
I deeply disagree with almost all your points, and I speak as someone much more informed of the effects, results and impacts of the attacks than the average American, based both on my time in Afghanistan and my overall experience with “deep operations.” Next time you are in town we ought to talk [about] it some more.
I appreciate this person’s respectful willingness to engage me in conversation, which I’ve found characteristic of most U.S. military officers I’ve met. And I readily accept that there are people – both American and Pakistani – who know more than I do about what specifically is happening in Waziristan. But I won’t concede anyone’s right to make moral or political judgments on my behalf. If they want me to agree with them, they should share their privileged information with me and then hope to convince me. “Trust us, we’re the experts” or “We know best” doesn’t trump the individual citizen’s autonomous responsibility.
Finally for now, I want to acknowledge the excellent question that Muzaffar Ahmad, a leader of the Pakistani-American community in Indianapolis, asked on my Facebook page: “Ethan, if I am the U.S. president, what would you suggest I should do after I give orders to end drone attacks?”
I don’t have the answer to that; I’m not sure anyone does. History is inherently tragic, and the guilt of one party doesn’t let other parties off the hook, and sometimes there is no right thing to do. This in itself is reason enough to be gentle and cautious in our dealings with each other, i.e. not to do things like drone attacks.
Anyone who reads this statement should feel free to post a comment or to write to me directly. I don’t have any answers, but I do know that drone attacks are badly damaging the relationship between Pakistan and America, as well as what goodwill still exists between Pakistanis and Americans, and that makes me very sad. Both countries’ establishments had better wake up and smell the coffee, and soon.
I want to end by quoting in full the best of all the comments on my Dawn article:
Just as drone attacks are wrong and cowardly because [they kill] innocent people indiscriminately, the same holds true for terrorist attacks/suicide bombing, which are also a cowardly killing [of] innocent men, women and children. I’m an Indian and I sympathise with innocent people killed, whether they are in Pakistan or in India.
Hear, hear.
ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004) and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010). His account of his February-March 2011 trip to Pakistan, titled “After the Flood,” will be added to the next printing of Overtaken By Events. He is currently writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans
Pakistan and America Both Need APPNA’s Leadership
Central Punjab, March 2011. Photo by Pete Sabo.
The following article was commissioned for the APPNA Journal (Vol. 13 No. 1, Summer 2011, pp. 20-21), by its editor, Dr. Mahmood Alam:
This is a very difficult time for Pakistan, for Pakistanis and other Muslims living in America, indeed for all friends of Pakistan and of humanity and peace. Drone attacks, Osama bin Laden, Raymond Davis, the long-term damage from last summer’s severe flooding – which I saw for myself in February and March in the Swat valley and in rural areas of Punjab province – there’s no rest from the litany of crises Pakistan faces.
The Pakistani-American community, led by APPNA and other organizations I admire and support, is remarkably steadfast in addressing the acute and chronic humanitarian needs of Pakistani society. Year after year, crisis after crisis, fundraiser after fundraiser, my Pakistani-American friends walk the walk. I admire you enormously for knowing and doing what needs to be done for the men, women and, above all, children of Pakistan, regardless of the constantly changing and increasingly alarming geopolitical situation. And I want you to know that I will continue walking the walk with you.
One way I think I’m positioned to help is by educating the American public about the Pakistan I’ve come to know and love, since I first went there in 1995. We all know Pakistan is far from perfect, but the point I try to get across to mainstream America is that the real Pakistan is very different, and much more interesting and likeable, than the Pakistan they see on TV. That’s an easy and enjoyable thing to do if you know and like Pakistan as I do, and it needs to be done, because the American public’s attitude toward Pakistan greatly affects our ability to support all the urgently needed humanitarian work that must be done. This is so because, as I and others have diagnosed, the Pakistani-American community suffers from chronic and worsening donor fatigue, and the wider American public represents a largely untapped source of funds for nonprofits working in Pakistan. But even prior to that, we need to elicit the positive interest and human sympathy of non-Pakistani, non-Muslim Americans, for everyone’s sake.
And more than that, I believe the very future of Pakistan itself depends on the Pakistani diaspora’s ability and willingness to reach out assertively to mainstream America. I believe that the best defense is a good offense, and that if you want something done right – in this case, if you want Americans to have a correct impression of Pakistan and of Muslims – you’ve got to do it yourself. This is where I believe APPNA and its chapters and individual members can play a powerful leading role on behalf of the Pakistani-American community as a whole – and thus, by extension, on behalf of Pakistan.
To mainstream America, APPNA members are potentially the human faces of Pakistan and of Islam. I say potentially, because unfortunately the faces that the words “Pakistan” and “Islam” still conjure up to many Americans are those of people like Osama bin Laden and Faisal Shahzad, the disturbed young man who planted a bomb in Times Square in New York last year. This will change only if we make a concerted effort to change it – but we can change it. What’s called for is a very assertive public diplomacy initiative, to replace those faces with the faces of accomplished professionals, good neighbors, and active citizens – people like you. Each of you lives and works somewhere in America, many of you in very provincial and even remote cities and towns. And it’s exactly in those places that the need is greatest.
APPNA has the membership and institutional infrastructure to make a big difference throughout American society. What if APPNA were to do this systematically, encouraging and supporting members and chapters who take initiative locally by reaching out to churches, schools, civic groups like Rotary, and universities? And even if this were not feasible on an APPNA-wide scale, there’s no reason it can’t be done by regional or state chapters or individual members. It just takes initiative, resourcefulness, and imagination, all of which I know Pakistanis possess. Pakistanis are among the most resourceful people I know; you’ve had to be, because for 64 years your country has faced one enormous challenge after another. As author Emma Duncan pointed out more than 20 years ago, nothing is ever settled in Pakistan. That’s chronically frustrating, but it has also been good practice for our current and coming crises, both in Pakistan and in America. The Pakistani-American community, led by APPNA members, has a lot to teach other Americans about how to rise to a challenge.
I want to continue rising to our shared challenges with you, because I believe we’re all in this together. On June 1, I gave a speech at a prestigious TEDx event sponsored by the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey. In it I pointed out, to a mostly non-Pakistani audience, that many Pakistani friends of mine – many of them physicians who volunteered their time and lifesaving skills – responded immediately and with real sympathy, concretely expressed, after the earthquake in Haiti. I also said that I felt American society had missed the opportunity to show similar human concern for Pakistanis last summer, when 20 percent of Pakistan was under water. And I quoted from a message I received from Dr. Uzma Shah of Boston, after I had published an article titled “Pakistan Floods: Why Should We Care?” on the Huffington Post and on my website. “It’s hard to see pictures from Pakistan,” Uzma wrote, “and I can’t help but choke back tears when I see all that desperation. And amidst all the furor about all things bad and hard about Pakistan and ‘Islam,’ it’s comforting to read your article. Because at the end of the day, we are all human, living in one world, sharing the same life.”
This is the point we must keep making, as often as necessary. It’s easy to explain away America’s failure to respond adequately to the floods: Americans suffered from “compassion fatigue” after Haiti; Pakistan is farther from the U.S. than Haiti is; a flood is a slow-moving disaster whose effects are less immediately dramatic than an earthquake. But it’s also hard to avoid facing the effects of a decade-long national climate that has made Muslims the only group in America against whom it’s considered permissible, sometimes even fashionable, to be bigoted. I believe, though, that – like all people – Americans are capable of responding to what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, if they’re invited and given the opportunity to do so. Many of you know this from your own experience. As my friend Dr. Shahnaz Khan of Zephyrhills, Florida told me, “It becomes personal. [My patients] actually tell me they think of me when they listen to the news. In fact, a lot of them probably didn’t know I was from Pakistan before 9/11, or didn’t even care. They say, ‘Be careful, Dr. Khan. Come back safely. Don’t get lost, don’t get hurt.’ It’s a good feeling, a lot of goodwill.” Just as the real Pakistan is better and more interesting than the Pakistan we see on TV, so is the real America.
So how can we effectively engage with and influence the real America? One thing I do is give away copies of my book, Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip, to students, libraries, religious and political leaders, and others in positions of influence in American society. The Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa understands what I’m trying to achieve; she says its “personal perspective … lends the book much of its charm and veracity and makes Overtaken By Events so compulsively readable.” The program’s potential is well illustrated by an email I received from Texas Christian University student Paul Jorden in January, just after I spoke to his World Religions class taught by Professor Mark Dennis. “Dear Mr. Casey,” Paul wrote,
Thank you very much for the copy of your book. I am thoroughly looking forward to learning more about life and the hardships of those in Pakistan and how terrorism shapes our (Americans’) perception of Muslims. Thank you for taking the time to speak to our class. I sincerely appreciate the importance of issues such as this, especially during times when it seems that our lives are permeated by a constant fear of terrorism via the news. Best of luck with promoting awareness.
The American mainstream media isn’t going to do the task for us, because – as Paul Jorden shows he understands in the quote above – the media is a major source of the problem. By all means, let’s try to influence politicians, policymakers, media moguls, and celebrities, but let’s not be seduced by the polite hearings and photo-ops that they offer us from time to time. We need to go over the heads of the American media and establishment, by reaching out directly to the American public. My public and classroom speaking and book sponsorship program are among the ways I’ve thought of to do this. I’m able to give away books thanks to the support of Pakistani-Americans like you, who sponsor multiple copies of Overtaken By Events. The more books are sponsored, the more I can give away. For example, I have an opportunity to give away 300 copies when I’ll be the keynote speaker at the annual Region III convention of NAFSA: Association of International Educators in Oklahoma City in October. I will also be at this year’s APPNA convention in St. Louis, speaking at the Fatima Jinnah Medical College alumni dinner on Friday evening and at the Social Welfare and Disaster Relief meeting on Saturday. Please find me there, or contact me any time on my cell phone (206-226-0509) or by email (ethan@ethancasey.com).
I’m finding young Americans the most receptive to learning about the Pakistan I know and love, and this brings to mind another asset we have to work with: your own community’s younger generation. When I spoke at the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit in January 2010, I was so moved by the efforts and accomplishments of the young volunteers there that I felt compelled to include in my speech this line: “We all know that America is a nation of immigrants. As an American whose ancestors came here in the 19th century from Ireland and Germany and France, I want to thank you for contributing not only your talents and material resources, but also your impressive children, to help build a new, improved America in the 21st century.” I’ve re-used that line many times since then. On this important level, America’s gain doesn’t have to be Pakistan’s loss. In my observation, Pakistani and other Muslim families give their children precisely the confidence, moral education, and sense of purpose and direction that are sorely lacking in all too many other American families. Your children are poised to become real leaders of American society, and that bodes well for all of us. And they are already in positions of influence with their peers at many of this country’s greatest universities. Congratulations – and let’s continue enlisting and empowering them.
And let’s continue working together to reach out to mainstream America, with the confidence that this country is in great need of your visible and vocal presence and leadership. I say that as an American who worries about my own country at least as much as I worry about Pakistan. By virtue of your profession, you enjoy a position of prestige and trust in American society, in cities and towns from coast to coast. If you invite me to your city, I’ll do my best to visit. And I invite you to make use of me, as a gora who enjoys sharing his friendship and appreciation for Pakistan and Pakistanis with other goras. Together we can change the relationship between Pakistan and America – one church or synagogue, one Rotary Club, one high school class at a time.
Ethan Casey is the author of the books Alive and Well in Pakistan and Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. He is currently writing a new chapter, “After the Flood,” to be added to the next edition of Overtaken By Events. He is also writing Bearing the Bruise: A Lifetime in Haiti for publication in 2012. He is on the Web at www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans and www.ethancasey.com.
