Fear and loathing

On Sep. 1, alarmed that there were Arabic-speaking men who “looked mean” on her late night flight from San Diego to Chicago, Leigh Robbins demanded to get off the plane in order “to protect her kids.” Her commotion forced the men to be questioned and searched by American Airlines and airport security, with no probable cause other than Robbins’ unsubstantiated panic. \nNever mind that these seven Iraqi and Iraqi-American men were working as consultants at Camp Pendleton helping to train U.S. Marines. Never mind that one of the men said his mother was killed by Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime. Never mind that the airline and airport police officers probably violated these passengers’ Fourth Amendment rights.\nInstead, I’d like to focus momentarily on Leigh Robbins, the 35-year-old homemaker who raised the “alarm.” What made her do it? It’d be easy to chalk up her response to xenophobia, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Robbins is trying to contact the seven men to apologize and seemed genuinely frightened for her children, who were with her at the time. \nRather than Arab-hating, Robbins represents the fear-driven world that Americans inhabit these days. As she said, “I can’t describe how afraid I was. … How can you overreact when it’s your children?” This gut-wrenching fear caused her to toss all reason out the window and caused the airline to illegally search seven men for flying while Arabic. The same fear has caused our elected officials to strip us of our First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendment rights without so much as a peep of discontent. \nThe specter of 9/11, which has loomed for nearly 6 years, has brought our public discourse to a standstill. We can all relate when Robbins says, “All I could think of was 9/11.” I admit, it’s hard not to think about the risk of catastrophe on the horizon.\nAt the same time, think about all that this bunker mentality has cost us. All the goodwill the world showered upon us has evaporated after two bungled wars and a prickly foreign policy that is all stick and no carrot. We’ve lost all the aforementioned rights, along with any semblance of the rule of law. In six years, we’ve lost what it ever meant to be an American.\nAfter all this, the spirit of America still lives on in this story, but not in Leigh Robbins. It lives on in David Al Watan, one of the “very frightening” men who so scared Robbins. Born in Nasiriyah, Iraq, he fled the country, first to a refugee camp then to the United States, where he now works as a consultant for the Marine Corps. Humiliated, he did what a good American should do: he filed a complaint in a court of law. Al Watan stated, “I am an American. I love this country. I would die for it.” As long as Al Watan is willing to die for a country too scared to sit next to him on an airplane, there’s hope for us yet.