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Guilty until proven innocent
On paranoia, xenophobia, ethnic profiling and giving away our ports to the Arabs
By Diego Costa
The same people who don’t think twice before jailing someone for having Mohamed for a first name can’t be seriously claiming racial tolerance when selling ports.
One of America’s most enviable conquests — this thick, superficial layer of efficient colorblindness and its pragmatic presumption for any human’s humanity — has been put into jeopardy by the “selling our ports to Dubai” issue that surfaced last week.
The navigation company based in London that has managed the ports of New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia was bought by Dubai Ports World, which is owned by the Dubai monarchy in the United Arab Emirates, an Arab Gulf state.
When this piece of information was brought to public attention, everyone was quick to take a position — mostly one that disagreed with President Bush. Even his supporters felt betrayed by the man who justifies any American-supported horror in the name of national security.
But while this may come as a surprise to me, I agree with the president’s decision to allow an Arab company to partially run American ports. I am absolutely sure we both support this for very different reasons though.
The administration’s persistently shady way of doing business must have some self-serving agenda hidden behind its Good Samaritan discourse. The same people who don’t think twice before jailing someone for having Mohamed for a first name can’t be seriously claiming racial tolerance when selling ports.
Whatever the real reasons are, we can be sure they serve America’s elite well and everyone else not so much.
But my reason for supporting the business transaction is the fact that no matter how threatened we may allow ourselves to feel, no matter how much danger we believe we are facing, it is not worth resorting to ethnic profiling for us to feel safer.
Even if we do feel safer we would be giving up on the very basis of American value (true, pre-9/11 American value, before being corrupted by the intellectually atrophied): the notion that everyone deserves the same chances, that everyone is the same.
This is a notion that has been artificially and forcefully ingrained in our heads, but it has worked well nonetheless. Not through personal introspection or philosophical inquiries (we left those for the Europeans, who are still working on it), but through legislation and practical solutions.
Of course there are exceptions, but as a general rule, only America could boast the pragmatic truths about racial tolerance, opportunity and amicable diversity.
Giving up one of the few unconditionally admirable American values that hasn’t been corrupted by post-9/11 derangement would mean throwing out the victory of battles that no other country in the world can say they’ve won.
If we allow ourselves this xenophobia travestied in precaution to guide our lives, we will be accepting a moral code that adjusts itself to paranoia and contextualizes humanity according to self-interest.
We cannot create more of a glass dome around America to protect us from everything extremism, dogmatism and Republicanism deem dangerous. We have obviously and historically believed everything they have told us.
If we let them convince us one more time that anything that comes from outside our borders is potentially poisonous, we will be giving in to a level of paranoia that spends more time feeding itself than aiming for happiness.
Facts, not people’s nationalities, should undermine business transactions. One could never see a person’s character or presume their future actions by looking at their passport cover or other aesthetic evidence of where they happen to come from. We cannot assume wrongdoing based on ethnicity, only based on tangible, accurate data.
To create an America so hermetically shut off from the barbarism and dogmatism of foreigners (and yet, so welcoming to the homebred kind) may mean creating a Disney World sphere for a few “good men” to the detriment of all morality.
Is it worth it? What would there be left for us to celebrate?
Let’s focus on illegal wiretapping, a Darfur peace solution and avoiding Iraqi civil war instead. We cannot afford to give up another one of our conquests just to nourish our delusional state of safeness.
An amoral, unethical, unlawful, torture-supporting safety may spear our physical being, but will not let the sound mind sleep at night.
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