Back in May 2001, my family flew out to my aunt’s wedding in
Southern California. We decided to bring
her and her new husband a wall clock as a wedding present. When my dad put the clock through the X-ray
machine in security, a buzzer went off.
The guard carried the clock, still in its wrapping paper and audibly
ticking, over to a table on the side.
The following conversation ensued:
Security Guard: What’s that?
Dad: A clock.
Security Guard: Oh, OK. Have a nice trip
Dad: Thanks. (Retrieves clock).
These were different times, of course, and I wouldn’t blame
a security guard today for actually checking to make sure that the loud ticking
device about to get on a plane was just a clock. (I wouldn’t have blamed them then, either. Of
course, this was back when airport security was the stuff of Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and the guy who
waved us through was probably tired from having to work security at The Vet the
night before just to pay his rent.)
That said, there’s a big difference between making someone
unwrap a present and treating anyone with an electronic device you don’t
recognize as a criminal. It’s bad enough
when the people who can’t tell the difference work airport security; when they
staff our schools, it’s a recipe for disaster.
The arrest of Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Texas student who
brought a clock mistaken for a bomb to school, reveals so many of our nation’s
pathologies that it’s hard to know where to start. Racism.
Xenophobia. Our immediate impulse
to involve the police in the lives of juveniles. (Particularly black and brown juveniles—see the
first two items on this list). Throw in
clueless, blundering bureaucrats who refuse to apologize because
THEPOLICYMUSTBEFOLLOWED, our poor science education system—really, no one could
tell the difference between a bomb and a clock?—and the State of Texas while we’re
at it.
But if this incident is going to lead to a National
Conversation or Teachable Moment or somesuch, I hope that we at least consider
the damage that more than a decade of post-9/11 paranoia has visited on all
aspects of our lives.
Yes, this problem is intertwined with the others: our
paranoia has a peculiar way of oozing out just a little bit more when brown
people are involved. But this goes
beyond just racism and xenophobia. Over
the last 14 years, we have allowed our public institutions to become more
closed off, more secretive, and more distrustful of us, the very people for
whom they exist, all for the illusory promise of safety.
And to what end? Are
we really safer? In the air, probably a
bit, though I’ll leave that judgment to the experts. In other aspects of our lives? I sort of doubt it. The level of security required to achieve
appreciable gains in safety on public buses or trains or in schools or stadiums
is more than the vast majority of us would accept.
And so we end up with low-level bureaucrats at a school in
Texas, who know their job is to keep kids “safe” (whatever that means) and
notice something “suspicious” (whatever that means) and decide to write with
the freedom of a 14-year-old kid on the blank check we’ve handed them.
I don’t know what’s sadder: the fact that someone thought
locking up Ahmed Mohamed would make America safer or the fact that, given the
world Ahmed’s grown up in, he probably shouldn’t have been surprised.
