The Friendly Cynic

Public Debt Isn’t the Root of all Evil: 4 Myths About Government Debt

1. Government debt is like a family’s household debt

There are several images like this floating around - often on Tea Party sites - comparing public US debt to a family budget:

Republicans have been the big purveyors of this analogy, but even Obama has used this sort of rhetoric when describing the US economy:

 All across America, families are tightening their belts and making hard choices. Now, Washington must show that same sense of responsibility.

However, the family analogy is a drastic oversimplification with important key differences. Here are some of them: 

Credit card interest rates are 100 times that of treasury interest rates.

US debt, despite what you might have heard, is considered among the safest investments in the world. Thus, investors are willing to loan the federal government money at extremely low interest rates. The 1-year treasury yield is, as of today, 0.1%. The average credit card interest rate is around 15%: 150 times more! The projected interest payment on outstanding public debt in 2012 is $240 billion. In the above family analogy, the payments amount to a manageable $2,400/year. 

Families owe debt to their creditors; the US mostly owes itself.

26% of public debt is owned by the federal government, much of it by the Social Security fund (which is, incidentally, not even close to broke). An additional 42% is held by private investors based in the US. A mere 32% is held by foreign creditors.

NOTE: Those percentages are based on September 2010 data, but the proportions today are about the same.

Governments can increase taxes to pay down debt; families cannot.

This one should be fairly obvious. Governments have much more control over their income than families do. In 2000, under Clinton, the US actually had a budget surplus of $230 billion dollars. Since then the Bush (and now Obama) tax cuts have added more than $2.8 trillion to the national debt, making up almost 20% of it. If those tax cuts had never been passed, the debt and the deficit would be far smaller.

2. China owns most of the US government debt

As I said above, the US owns most of the national debt, with only 32% held by foreign countries. China owns about 24% of debt owned by foreign countries (or about 8% of total debt), followed by Japan at 21% (7% of total), and the UK at 9% (3% of total). The alarmism about China owning the US or “having us by the balls” is completely unfounded.

3. Excessive government debt caused the eurozone crisis

BBC has an excellent infographic showing why this is false. They conclude:

So to recap, government borrowing - which has ballooned since the 2008 global financial crisis - had very little to do with creating the current eurozone crisis in the first place, especially in Spain (Greece’s government is the big exception here). So even if governments don’t break the borrowing rules this time, that won’t necessarily stop a similar crisis from happening all over again.

Spain and Italy are now facing nasty recessions, because no-one wants to spend. Companies and mortgage borrowers are too busy repaying their debts to spend more. Exports are uncompetitive. And now governments - whose borrowing has exploded since the 2008 financial crisis savaged their economies - have agreed to drastically cut their spending back as well.

You’ll notice that Spain actually has a lower public debt-to-GDP ratio than Germany does (72% vs. 77%), and yet Germany has a model economy compared to most of Europe. As of November 2011, Germany’s unemployment is at a stellar 5.5% compared to Spain’s atrocious 22.9%. Germany can borrow money at a tiny 10-year rate of 1.77%, whereas Spain must pay nearly triple that: 5.22%. If public debt is the root cause of the eurozone crisis, how does one explain the huge disparity between Germany and Spain?

4. For the US economy to improve, we must balance the budget

Balancing the budget is just about the worst thing we could do for the US economy right now. Debt does of course need to be reigned in over the long haul. Obviously interest payments that increase faster than GDP and tax revenue are unsustainable in the long term, but the much more immediate threat to the economy is the startling lack of demand. A survey of small business owners showed that their primary concern is economic uncertainty: 

What’s more, the small businesses surveyed debunked claims that regulations are crushing small businesses and our economic recovery. Only 13% believe regulation is the biggest problem facing their small businesses. Conversely, 46% believe their small business is hurt by uncertainty about the future economy and 43% believe their small business is hurt by the rising cost of doing business.

The Republican talking point that deregulation is the solution to our growth and unemployment problems is pure myth. Businesses have no reason to hire because not enough people are buying their products! Why else would American companies be sitting on $2 trillion (yes, $2 trillion) in cash? They obviously have the money to hire, but why should they if the extra productivity doesn’t lead to extra sales? The solution to this problem is simple. The government must spend and hire where businesses are unwilling. 

Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich puts it nicely:

When consumers and businesses can’t boost the economy on their own, the responsibility must fall to the purchaser of last resort. As John Maynard Keynes informed us 75 years ago, that purchaser is the government.

Government can hire people directly to maintain the nation’s parks and playgrounds and to help in schools and hospitals. It can funnel money to help cash-starved states and local government so they don’t have to continue to slash payrolls and public services. And it can hire indirectly - contracting with companies to build schools, revamp public transportation and rebuild the nation’s crumbling highways, bridges and ports.

Not only does this create jobs but also puts money in the hands of all the people who get the jobs, so they can turn around and buy the goods and services they need - generating more jobs. Not exactly rocket science.

You might be thinking, “Isn’t it crazy to borrow even more when US debt is already so immense?” The absolute amount of debt is not as important at debt-to-GDP ratio ($14T in debt is unwieldy if your annual economy is $5T, but not if it’s $30T). The other way of bettering that ratio (besides cutting debt) is increasing GDP by stimulating economic growth. As I mentioned earlier, the US can borrow incredibly cheaply right now because, despite the S&P’s dubious downgrade, confidence in the US to repay its debts is incredibly high. We can borrow $1 for 10 years at a cost of less than 2 cents. Let’s take advantage of this cheap money to rebuild roads, employ teachers, and grow the economy. Then when our GDP is larger and our employment situation stable, the debt will be far more manageable, and we can cut spending and increase taxes to pay it off.

This has worked before. From 1933 to 1937, our debt increased 63% from $22.5 billion to $36.4 billion to fund the New Deal programs. Over this same period, our GDP grew 63% from $56.4 billion in 1933 to $91.9 billion in 1937. Unemployment decreased dramatically from 24.9% to 14.3%. Only when this stimulus was reversed and austerity policies were instated from 1937 to 1939 (paltry 0.3% growth in government spending) did unemployment and the debt-to-GDP ratio shoot up. The only arguments against further government spending are political: age-old debunked conservative rhetoric about tightening our belts and taking our lumps. History has shown that there are no good economic reasons for the government to sit on its hands and watch the unemployed suffer.

Rush Limbaugh Points Out the Myth of Liberal Bias in the Media (and So Do I)

Perhaps the most pervasive myth in this country is that the media has a liberal bias. As a liberal, I find the idea of a liberal mainstream media completely laughable. The only network that airs anything close to my political views is MSNBC, and Rush Limbaugh admits as much today on his radio show:

if it weren’t for MSNBC we wouldn’t have any liberal sound bites.  I’ve told Cookie I’m sick of it, ban MSNBC, and we can’t, ‘cause there’s no other place to get liberal sound bites.  There isn’t any other place.  I mean CNN is just insane over there.  They emphasize their hosts, they have guests, but just roll tape on ‘em and it’s so boring. It’s not worth putting anything from CNN on the air. 

The myth of the liberal media has been an extraordinarily effective rhetorical device for conservatives. With one little label, they can wave away nearly any mainstream story they don’t like as liberal bias and come off looking like marginalized victims in the process. It’s quite a neat trick. By playing the “liberal media” defense, conservatives are let off the hook of actually having to marshal any evidence to defend their positions and repudiate the opposing side. Ed Brayton ably skewers this defense:

What I mean is that we so often hear accusations of bias, or non-objectivity, as though that claim by itself meant anything. When someone with an opinion on subject X writes about the issue, someone with the opposite opinion will inevitably say, “Well he’s biased. After all, he’s a (fill in the blank - pro-gay activist, anti-gay activist, “Darwinist”, creationist, etc).” But that argument by itself means nothing. If the person making the argument has a bias that has affected the validity of the argument they made, then point out the flaw in the reasoning, the false assumption or the factual misstatement that the bias caused. This argument is very similar to what I call the argumentum ad labelum fallacy, the idea that if you apply a label to someone you’ve defeated their argument. Merely pointing out that someone already has an opinion on something does not indicate that their claims or arguments are false.

So what is the bias of the media if not liberal? The Daily Kos doesn’t get it quite right in their article, titled “Limbaugh Admits Conservative Bias of Media”.  First, Limbaugh doesn’t actually mention a conservative bias, and the absence of a liberal bias doesn’t imply one. Second, although the mainstream press may in fact have a conservative bias on the whole, it is not an explicit bias in the way Fox News, et al., are biased. Assessing the true biases of the mainstream media beyond the simplistic left-right continuum is a difficult exercise, but I’ll try to pick two that I find particularly important to looking at mainstream news sources with a critical eye.

First, there is the mainstream media elite’s immersion in establishment political and corporate culture. The media stars of today have far more in common with the millionaire political figures and executives they cover than with the average American. They get invited to the same dinners and super soaker fights. This is no more apparent than in the case of CNN’s Erin Burnett, which I wrote about here. Burnett, a former banking executive, who is now engaged to a very high-level executive at Citi aired a hit piece belittling the Occupy protests. That is an extreme example, but it is quite illustrative of the blurring of the line between journalists and those that they are supposed to keep accountable. More subtly, journalists must maintain cordial rather than adversarial relationships with the political and corporate officials they cover so that they can get all-important “access” (first dibs on scoops and leaks that typically favor those who are doing the leaking). 

Second, there is what journalism professor Jay Rosen calls “regression to a phony mean”. It’s the fallacy that if there are two sides, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. There are certain cases where this is obviously not true. Take the example of the two women in King Solomon’s court each wanting to keep the baby. The one position to take that is obviously incorrect is the centrist position, splitting the baby in half.  In the left-right narrative that makes for such a good story, this typically means a bias toward centrism. However, when the Republicans make outlandish and unreasonable demands (like no tax hikes, only spending cuts) and the Democrats proffer something something only slightly less extreme (3:1 spending cuts to tax hikes), the center position ends up tilting toward GOP extremism, and thus a centrist bias becomes a conservative bias. 

For these reasons and many more (Jay Rosen’s analysis is well worth reading in full), it is quite rare to hear anything approaching a liberal position in a mainstream news source. 

Elizabeth Warren: Possibly Not the Second Coming of FDR

Yves Smith has an excellent post on her blog Naked Capitalism detailing her doubts about Elizabeth Warren’s progressive credentials. Smith concludes:

She came to a strongly liberal view on a comparatively narrow set of issues, on how banks have looted customers, based on intensive research. She does not have that depth of expertise on many, if any, of the other topics she opines on. She has surrounded herself with mainstream Democratic advisors, the bulk of them with links to Harvard. She may wrap her views in populist rhetoric, but I strongly suspect, ex banking reform and other consumer protections, she’ll be far more centrist than most of her enthusiasts anticipate.

Some points to note:

She was a Republican prior to her conversion experience through extensive research into bankruptcies

…

“Our number one responsibility is to protect Americans from terrorism, that’s our job, so being tough on terrorism is enormously important,” said Warren yesterday at a campaign stop in Gloucester.

…

In other words, her message, at best, is she doesn’t agree with how OWS is seeking to effect change. They should vote for people like her instead.

I think Smith is extrapolating quite a lot from the handful of comments Warren has made on the record so far about issues other than consumer protection. However, Smith’s interpretation of Warren’s comments is enough to make my enthusiasm for her candidacy much more guarded. Aside from consumer protection and banking reform, she may very well be an Obama- or Clinton-style centrist Democrat.

Hypothetical Candidate Leading GOP Field

I find this endlessly amusing. According to the latest Gallup Poll, a hypothetical candidate described as “the Republican Party’s candidate” leads Obama 46-38.

The hypothetical candidate has more support (46%) than any of the other leading candidates when polled against Obama: Romney (44.2%), Cain (40.8%), Perry (39.2%), Paul (41.4%). (Source: aggregate polling data from RealClearPolitics.com) In fact, the fake candidate is the only GOP candidate actually leading Obama in the polls right now. 

The public wants a GOP candidate, but not one of the ones that actually exists. The idea of someone to oppose Obama from the right is appealing, but only in theory because the modern Republican party, in practice, is not a source of policy alternatives. It’s a loose agglomeration of anti-Obama rhetoric, fear-mongering, slogans, and talking points. Each successive Republican debate underscores this. Between Romney’s chameleonic slithering, Cain’s highly regressive tax plan, Perry’s inability to form a sentence, and Paul’s rank every-man-for-himself views on health care, there is nary a coherent view to be found. The only valid criticisms of Obama’s policies are to be found on the left, and despite Obama’s centrism (or outright neoconservatism) on several issues, left of Obama in this political climate means pinko, Commie, socialist, extreme leftist.

Obama Vows Sanctions for Iran Due to “Terror Plot” by Absent-Minded Used Car Salesman

You just can’t make this stuff up. Mansour Arbabsiar, an Iranian expatriate who has lived in Texas for 30 years, has been accused by the FBI of a global terrorism plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador. Now Obama is threatening sanctions on Iran because of the Iranian government’s supposed involvement. Here’s the thing, though. Arbabsiar is an incompetent, forgetful nitwit. Here are some excerpts from a NY Times article: 

He was perennially disheveled, friends and acquaintances said, and hopelessly disorganized.

…

Many of his old friends and associates in Texas seemed stunned at the news, not merely because he was not a zealot, but because he seemed too incompetent to pull it off.

…

“His socks would not match,” said Tom Hosseini, a former college roommate and friend. “He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan.”

…

He later remarried and tried his hand at a number of businesses, selling horses, ice cream, used cars and gyro sandwiches, friends said. All of them appear to have flopped, and federal and state records show a trail of liens, business-related lawsuits and angry creditors.

…

Sam Ragsdale, who runs his own wholesale car business in Corpus Christi, had one word for Mr. Arbabsiar: “Worthless.”

The list goes on. How is anyone, let alone the most powerful man in the world taking this seriously? Let me get this straight: Iran wants to kill a Saudi diplomat because… um, just because they’re evil (remember, they’re part of the Axis of Evil). But instead of taking a canoe 100 miles across the Persian Gulf to Saudi Arabia, they decide to do it on the soil of a hostile country who has the most powerful military in the world and a particularly itchy trigger finger for bombing Muslim countries. And to carry out the delicate, extremely risky plot, they put their best man on it: a chronically forgetful, slovenly gyro purveyor/used car salesman with no religious or political leanings.

What. The. Fuck.

Seriously.

What the fuck?

How does anyone believe this? Yet the media is dutifully regurgitating the “terror plot” as spoon-fed to them by the White House’s army of anonymous officials, always at the ready with shovelfuls of baseless, administration-serving storytelling. Here is a smattering of headlines, without even a hint that the whole story is highly implausible. All of your favorite torchbearers of journalistic excellence are here:

CNN: U.S. official: ‘Multiple’ sources strengthen case against Iran

Fox News: U.S. Ties Iran to Assassination Plot Against Saudi Diplomat on U.S. Soil

Reuters: Alleged Iran plot may have violated U.N. treaty

Washington Post: Iranian charged in terror plot

Washington Post: What Iran’s alleged terror plot tells us …

(and the always classic) Washington Post: Terror plot foiled

And then there are our fearless leaders, who have been talking about Iran sanctions. Of course no one who is claiming they buy it — not Biden, not Obama, not Clinton — is actually buying it. The question is, why would our leaders want to mislead the public about Iran? (Another question is, couldn’t they have come up with a better story?)

———————————————————————————————————

Update

I’m updating this with an exchange I had via Facebook because I think it clarifies my points. Andrew wrote:

 So if this is a lie, what does the US have to gain from it if they are found out?

I wrote:

Let me clarify a little because I think you are reading my post as “top-level US officials orchestrated the plot and are now lying about it”. I think it’s more likely that the FBI manufactured this terrorism plot (that explains the choice of someone easily manipulable) because they entrap manipulable people in terrorism plots all the time and then catch them in a sting [1][2][3][4]. I’m not sure that these sting operations go any higher than the FBI, and I think their motivation is simply to make themselves look good at catchin’ terrists. They probably don’t even see the plots as manufactured because they view someone with extremist tendencies and the ability to be manipulated as already guilty of terrorism.

What is particularly interesting about this case is the speed at which Obama, Biden, and Clinton began chest-beating in Iran’s general direction over the whole thing because the plot is really quite bizarre — and that alone should give them pause before making and announcing drastic policy changes — and the connection to Iran’s Quds Force is tenuous at best, according to various experts on Iran [5]. I think that our leaders are merely being opportunistic about the situation. Why would they want sanctions against Iran? Take your pick. Maybe it’s a firmer step against their fledgling nuclear program (many of Iran’s nuclear scientists have been mysteriously killed). Maybe it’s a prelude to military involvement there. Maybe it’s an attempt at gaining more public support for some as yet unknown Israeli action against Iran.

For more on the absurdity of the plot, these two articles are great:
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/12/the_very_scary_iranian_terror_plot/singleton/
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/10/theres-lot-s-hard-believe-iranian-assasination-plot/43568/

[1]http://www.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/
[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/politics/30fbi.html
[3]http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2010/10/27/would-be-metro-bomber-caught-in-sting/
[4]http://www.salon.com/2010/11/28/fbi_8/
[5]http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/10/theres-lot-s-hard-believe-iranian-assasination-plot/43568/

I guess in all that I didn’t quite answer your question. I don’t think American administrations are used to having their flimsy bases for foreign policy questioned by anyone with mainstream credibility (see Iraq War), so because most press outlets lead with headlines like “Iranian terror plot foiled” and most people don’t dig any deeper, the incident serves its purpose of making Iran look evil. If Obama and co. are actually held accountable for making drastic foreign policy choices based on really flimsy evidence, they can just wash their hands of it and people will believe it because people are stupid (and Iran is really, really evil). Jay Carney can smooth it over in press-secretaryese, “The Administration was not made aware of some crucial details that are just now coming to light.”

CNN’s Erin Burnett Gets Engaged to Citi Exec, Airs Occupy Wall Street Hit Piece

CNN’s Erin Burnett recently got engaged to Citigroup executive David Rubulotta. Don’t worry, though. She is still an unbiased, perfectly objective journalist. She even covers both sides of the Occupy Wall Street story in her show’s — one can only really call it Murrowesque — piece hilariously titled, “Seriously, Protesters!?”

The Protesters’ Side: She interviews one protester for a whole 15 seconds. 

The Other Side: She spends the rest of the 3-minute segment correcting an inaccuracy that one protester made, as though it were the sum total of the burgeoning movement, and smugly commenting over a montage of less than flattering or representative footage of the protesters. 

You can watch it here.

The federal government has made money from TARP. If only the protesters knew that, I guess they could just go home. Oh, but wait, they’re also protesting the greed and profligacy of Wall Street banks that led us to our current astronomical unemployment rate, the Government’s complete deference to and complicity in the banks’ interests, and the increasing concentration of wealth at the top that is the result of decades of deregulation and pro-business, anti-union policies. But why cover what the protest is actually about, CNN, when you can just sit on the sidelines, laugh at something you don’t understand, and drink champagne?

As for her point about the protesters using — gasp — technology made by corporations, Glenn Greenwald has an appropriate reponse:

Apparently, you’re not allowed to protest rampant criminality on Wall Street and the corruption of corporatist control of the political process unless you keep your money under your mattress and communicate by carrier pigeon — at least not without incurring the derision of those wicked satirists at the NYT.

(h/t to digby)

U.S. Assassinates U.S. Citizen

I’ve yet to read any specific claim that Anwar al-Awlaki broke any laws, but that didn’t stop our government from assassinating him today. Why bother to have a trial or due process when it’s clear (according to no evidence that has actually been released) that he’s ”one of the top terrorist recruiters in the world” (says CNN) and “has been associated with many plots in the United States” (says The New York Times). Which plots, and in what way was he associated with them? We will never know because our media mindlessly parrots what is told to them by anonymous government officials (or as the source of the NY Times article is described, “an official in Washington”), and fails to do even the most basic independent verification of government claims, even as they have been demonstrated to be false again and again. 

I guess this is the way we as Americans enact justice now. None of those quaint old notions of a trial or due process. Once someone has been accused of terrorism, we can’t even muster up enough due process for a show trial. We’ll just flying one of our robot planes over and assassinate them. Even if we miss a couple of times and kill other people in the process, it’s fine. It beats having to give him a trial and risk not giving him the sentence we decided in advance in the court of public opinion.

Cattle Haulers, Sarah McLachlan, and Almond Milk

As I was taking the bus home from Detroit to Chicago recently, I was struck by a chance juxtaposition: a McDonald’s billboard advertising a Big Mac and three straight truckloads full of tightly confined cattle. The metallic hold had customary air holes just large enough for a cow’s snout to poke through slightly, and several of the cows were taking advantage of the openings, so as to – I would imagine – breathe in fresh air instead of the still, foul, fecal air of their cell. My first thought was that human beings cannot possibly be alone in the animal kingdom in their distaste for being confined to small spaces. My second was that this sort of confinement was the norm, not the exception, of how most animals raised for meat and dairy are consigned to live out their grim existence.

When they get to wherever they are going, these cattle will most likely live out their days in an area just as densely packed as those semi trailers, feeding primarily on barely edible corn that is not even close to the sort of diet that cows evolved to subsist on, and pumped full of antibiotics to fight off all of the disease they’ll be exposed to as a result of their close quarters (Google Image search for CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] if you don’t believe me.) And all of this cruelty that we would never dream of inflicting on cute or at least less palatable animals is driven by our insatiable demand for meat and dairy. When dogs are forced to live in such conditions, it is a crime, and I hear no end to the condemnation from ordinary people. Where is the outrage at how grotesquely we treat our farm animals? I assure you, cute or not, delicious or not, they are no more immune to suffering than our pets.

We are hiding the true cost of our meals. We are hiding it in animal suffering. We are hiding it in taxpayer money that pays the corn subsidies that feed factory farmed animals at bargain basement prices. We are hiding it in the antibiotic-resistant diseases that come from our reckless use of antibiotics on farm animals. We are hiding it in the cost of treatment for heart disease, largely the result of the American meat- and dairy-centric diet.

As a meat eater for 21 years, I used to dismiss activist vegetarians as breathless and overly dramatic and sentimental. They had watched that ASPCA ad with Sarah McLachlin one too many times. After all, these are just dumb animals that we’re inflicting harm upon. My view of their cause was that it was a marginal and extreme one, not to truly be pondered or taken seriously. (I believe this thinking has plagued many unpopular political views that deserve legitimate consideration by all politically interested people: marijuana decriminalization and feminism, to name two causes with very successfully marginalized activists.) But really, it is as simple as this. We torture animals. Indisputably, we treat some mammals (cows and pigs) in ways that would quite literally be criminal if we treated some other mammals (dogs and cats) the same way. The simple part is recognizing that fact. The hard part is overcoming a practice that is ingrained evolutionarily, culturally, and in lifelong personal habits.

Do you have to become a card-carrying vegan tomorrow as penance? Of course not. Here is my challenge to you (and me):

• If you eat mass-produced meat two or three times a day (if it’s cheap, not marked organic, or grass-fed, it is probably factory farmed), try cutting meat out of one of those meals twice a week.
• If you eat meat only a few meals a week, try saving those meals for a home-cooked or restaurant-prepared meal that you know comes from a farm that treats their animals ethically. Farms that care about their animals’ well-being generally care more about the quality of the meat too.
• If you eat meat sparingly, try going vegetarian for a month.
• If you eat cheese and eggs a few times a week (me), try to make sure they are cage-free eggs and ethically made cheese (avoid Sargento, Lucerne, and other mass-produced brands), and consider forgoing one of the meals a week in favor of something vegan or raw.
• If you have milk often, replace it with soy milk or almond milk. Now that I’ve been drinking mostly soy and almond milk for a while, cow’s milk now has a strange, sour aftertaste to me.

The GOP’s New Slogan: Conforming to the Past

Rick Santorum earlier tonight: “We would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past.” That about sums up the Republican Party. You can watch the rest of Santorum’s regressive, incoherent views on gays in the military below, if you have the stomach for it. With every passing day after the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, these views look increasingly antiquated and immoral. In 20 years, young people will be shocked that these views were ever given a mainstream platform.

Flying While Brown and the Real Legacy of 9/11

On the same day President Obama trumpeted, “we refuse to live in fear,” from behind bulletproof glass, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife from Ohio was detained for hours and body cavity searched after her flight landed in Detroit for “suspicious behavior,” which apparently included such highly questionable behavior as playing with her phone and reading. As our leaders and media droned on about American strength and resolve, our true colors were on full display for this woman and her two Indian rowmates. The 9/11 legacy is not just the pageantry and chest-beating of those who exploit the tragedy for political gain and ratings; it is this:

Again, I asked what was going on, and the man said judging from their line of questioning that I could probably guess, but that someone on the plane had reported that the three of us in row 12 were conducting suspicious activity. What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn’t know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough? Even considering that we didn’t say a word to each other until it became clear there were cops following our plane? Perhaps it was two Indian man going to the bathroom in succession?

…

We walked outside of the building, and for the first time I saw that we were at the airport police station, which also doubled as the spot for the local Homeland Security office to reside–an office that didn’t exist 10 years ago.

It is the expansion, seemingly without limit, of our sprawling multi-billion dollar national security apparatus, designed to protect us from every monster under the bed, every bump in the night, and every brown person exhibiting “suspicious behavior”. It is the human cost of these activities — the systematic suspicion and intimidation of Arab- and Indian-Americans. It is our willingness to put up with full body cavity searches and indefinite detentions in cells of no apparent jurisdiction. 

Resolve is not a police, FBI, and DHS firestorm over every paranoid racist’s suspicions. Resolve is not bulletproof glass and semi-automatic weaponry and holding cells. Resolve is to acknowledge that absolute safety is a myth, that our government cannot protect us from every conceivable threat, no matter how many rights we trade away.