A couple of years ago, giving a talk at a church in Seattle, I was conveying as best I could the anger Pakistanis feel toward the US about drone attacks, when a woman raised her hand and asked, “What’s a drone attack?” I give her credit for asking, but I was astounded nonetheless. Ever since then I’ve kept that woman in my mind, and often cited her to audiences, as an example of the ignorance of ordinary Americans about things that are happening – I should say things we’re doing to other people – beyond our shores.
My mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit used to say that we’re all ignorant, only about different things. That can be a helpful working assumption when trying to achieve common understanding, but it’s also true that some of us are closer than others to the coal face of hard experience. For example, the novelist John Grisham recently pointed out that support for the death penalty is “still very much the consensus among white people in the South. Black people know better because they have seen so many wrongful convictions and executions.”
The same goes for drones. In Karachi in 2009 I met a teenage refugee from Waziristan, who told me: “Most of these drone attacks kill innocent people. ... What the US is doing by these drone attacks is creating more problems for themselves, rather than solving problems. Every person [in Waziristan] that did not want to carry weapons, now wants to carry a weapon, because his children have died in these US attacks. They’re just making it worse for themselves.”
Well, America, drones are coming soon to your local police department. But don’t worry, a boosterish Nov. 27 article in the Los Angeles Times assures us, they’re going to be used only for good purposes like spraying pesticides on crops and catching bad guys. The Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to issue new rules for the use of drones in US domestic airspace in January, is concerned about “the creative ways in which criminals and terrorists might use the machines.” But don’t worry; everything will be fine, because “The aerospace industry believes that the good guys – the nation’s law enforcement agencies – are probably the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.”
And oh, by the way, “Officials in Tampa, Fla., want to use them for security surveillance at next year’s Republican National Convention.”
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where all this is headed. In fact, we’re there already. For years now we’ve been growing accustomed to living our lives under perpetual surveillance, as we do more and more of our communications and transactions online and on the cell phones that we carry with us everywhere we go. As far as I’ve been able to tell, most of my fellow Americans either don’t really understand what’s happening, or they don’t object; many members of what Richard Nixon all too accurately called the silent majority hold the attitude that “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”
This sort of defiant smugness is not unique to middle America; I encountered it in middle England a decade ago, when I was living there and cameras were appearing (discreetly) on every street corner. The unasked question, of course, is who gets to decide whether I’m doing anything wrong. The answer, according to Them, is that They do. Not that I’m paranoid or anything.
Most Americans apparently prefer security to freedom. You can’t really have both, but even in such conditions, we’re free whether we like it or not: free to live in fear and paranoia, presumed guilty (of what exactly, it’s not always clear), or to live as if we were free. If we live as if we were free, then in a real sense we are free.
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