Done any traveling lately? Those of us who have — particularly to any of
the nation’s centerpiece cities on the East or West Coasts — have noticed
some differences. It isn’t just the dogs and their camouflaged attendants at
the airports. It isn’t just the extra-early show-up times and the extra-long
lines. It’s also in the uniformed personnel (again, usually with canine
companions), who turn up in the subway stations, train terminals, and other
points of urban interchange.
Even if you haven’t been anywhere, you’ve seen enough television
or read enough papers to know about the escalating anthrax peril. How long
before we take to donning surgical gloves just to open our own mail?
And now there is mounting talk of requiring a national identity
card — one that can be read with electronic sensors and can’t be faked.
There is a high side to all this, of course — a curious bonding
that transcends former jealousies. When black and white Americans pass each
other now in public places, there is likely to be a surge of comfort that
didn’t use to be there — a recognition that, whatever else we may be or have
been to each other, neither of us are likely to be terrorists from the remote
and ever more mysterious Middle East.
And there’s the rub: Whether we own up to it or not, we are all
profiling now — those of us in this newly configured majority. Even the
swarthy of skin pass muster as soon as we recognize the reassuring Latino lilt
of their syllables. Asian? No problem.
But for all the dissolving old barriers, there are the troubling
new ones. Call a computer supply store and find yourself greeted across an
anonymous telephone line by the disembodied, accented voice of someone named,
say, Rashid, and you are face to face with the issue (ear to ear, rather,
since it is — both literally and figuratively — about facelessness).
We are in the same state of affairs as pertained during the
initial phase of our involvement in World War II, post-Pearl Harbor, when we
thought we could identify the enemy in our midst. He — or she — was of
visible Japanese ancestry and lived, probably, in or near one of the
population centers of the West Coast. We all know what happened. The resulting
relocation camps were an outrage — something we of subsequent generations
have always managed to feel righteous and superior about. And never mind that,
among the innocent masses so interned, there were doubtless a few bona fide
saboteurs. The same dubious success might well be had if at some point in the
present crisis we should attempt the unseemly, unsavory, and ultimately
impossible task of locking up every Muslim we can find.
We know that we can’t do this. We know that in the act of doing
so we would be harming ourselves — and not just because a huge number of
“them” would turn out, in every distinguishing legal and oral sense,
to be “us” as well, citizens of the United States or on their way to
being so.
As matters continue to complicate, the point may cease to be
academic, but this dilemma, too, has its high side. It will force us to a more
trying expedient than the national identity card. It will cause us to define
ourselves and our civil heritage by feats of tolerance that even in peacetime
require a leap of faith before they can metamorphose finally into acceptance
of another’s claim to common rights and a common destiny. It will force us to
reinvent the idea of America — and in the original mold.
When we have successfully done so, dismissing trivial and real
fears alike, that will be the only certificate of national identity we’ll
need.
Jackson Baker is a senior editor of the Flyer.
