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I suppose in a way I have a knack for guilt – the lurking shadow of a staunch Calvinist upbringing perhaps. There are many plausible explanations. There I was, in a foreign airport (Dublin, Ireland – so they spoke a comprehensible variety of English, at least), and it had taken me no end of time to find the booth where VAT refunds could be managed. All I really wanted was to ask whether the few purchases I had made could be sufficient to demand all the paper-work (once I got to the bottom of the matter, or course they did not). The line was making no apparent progress, and patience is never my long suit. There they were in front of me, the four of them, obviously a group, and just as obviously not terribly focused on getting the line to proceed. They were speaking a language that rang no bells at all to me. Then I looked more carefully at them (I had little else to do but fume). "Arabs," I thought. Once they had their passports out, the Arabic print on them confirmed it.
Which is only part of the shame. After all, part of the fun of being in a foreign, "international" place is to try to read costume and gesture and appearance. But this was different, because no sooner had I reached my conclusion than a cloud of dread swept over me. Generalized dread. I did not imagine any specific hazard – a bomb or a gun or even a box-cutter. But still, and unmistakably, I was afraid. Which may be why I abandoned my place in line.
One of my favorite personal defenses is what I might call "metaphor-building." It's a way of overriding the loneliness of the strictly personal incident or observation – read it as a sign of some larger phenomenon. Poets, of course, do it all the time, more or less habitually.
But I don't think I'm just ducking my own responsibility for the "profiling" I was undertaking. That vague, deep, persistent dread is where so much of my country lives, now. And it operates as an excuse for so much behavior, from saber rattling (even on the part of those who lived through the Vietnam debacle) to overriding the Constitution (even by those who took part in the struggle to widen civil rights) to scapegoating.
When I was young, there was a fad for quiz shows built around effective lying. The one with the most relevant title in this instance was "Who Do You Trust?" Alas, that's a hard question to answer, at the moment.
I keep trying to concentrate on a counter-thought, propounded by John Lennon: "All we are saying, is 'Give Peace a Chance.'"
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