Milgram Re-proven

Since Ive known for a while that I'll be flying tonight to New York, Ive been scanning the articles related to airport terrorism (which, besides the comics and my forecast), is the only thing Im really motivated in reading these days. And frankly, Ive been horrified by the sociological and psychological implications of some of these actions taken and the reasons for suspicion of certain (mind you, only certain) passengers.

So a Muslim (particularly Mohammedan) name is immediately suspect. Then comes any foreign sounding name that is not American or European sounding, (or even hardcore Chinese Japanese). "The Orientals, you see, concentrate their revolution on their own soil. A sudden streak of, oh, I dont know, revenge, seems to have struck these brown skin chaps. And they're at it in a sneaky sort of way. Insidious, these non-white races, you see.

Let us leave no stone unturned in our war to weed out terrorism from our soil. Let us not only ban all sorts of liquids (because though in all likelihood our government-employed research scientists are closet pyromaniacs themselves) and other esentials to man's somewhat natural instincts for vanity and entertainment (when so many options are available these days besides food, hunting and sex, such as Ipods and fancy cellphones with assorted installed games) but let us make travel positively unbearable for these raccoons so that our airports are free of such unsavoury elements and we make life a far more inconvenient strain on our time. It is our way of harking back to the days of simplicity, as it were.

So we've hired trained specialists to weed out the above mentioned unsavoury elemets from our airports. What constitutes suspicious behaviour? Speaking in a foreign language (that actually sounds pretty sexy). Goddammit. Isn't English a universal language by now? Checking one's watch frequently. Cant possibly be because they're worried about a late flight. Oh no, has to be because they're expecting a bomb to go off any time soon. Cheering when a mobile phone rings after the flight takes off? Jolly subversive of the folks don't you think? (Obviously the pinko-greys - to reference Henry Fielding's term for his own race in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, and subsequently my ABSOLUTE ADORATION of the term, not least because its true!- have no idea of the little tapori mentality that frequently associates itself with some provincial folk). Oh, of course, and the obvious. Being brown. Absolute deviation from the norm. Just ghastly, the lack of taste of some people. What a colour - associated with shit, which is what these people are... Must... be.... detained... *hypnotic trance*"

I wonder what REALLY goes on in the minds of these policy makers. I suppose they have a noble goal in mind in theory - that of making our countries and airports safe, but they have a serious problem with implementation. And it hits closer to home (mine anyway) each day. My fiance, for instance, is light-skinned, about a shade darker than me, and with a lovely rosy complexionm so that he doesnt even look Pakistani, but Caucasian. Still, despite his being a rather lanky unassuming young man, he gets detained every time. One would wish it was because female attendants wished to flirt with him, but it isn't. This time he was detained for two hours for no reason. He is no afraid the two stamps he has from his trips to Malaysia to meet friends has affected his status, despite his being an American citizen. He described the security officials' positive enjoyment in tossing out his hair gel and other assorted liquids men use and voiced his concern about the display of such an inappropriate emotion.

And this brings to my mind Milgram's shockingly validated experiment in Yale in the 50's. He wished to test how the Nazis could possibly act as they did in terms of their terrible treatement of the Jews during the Holocaust. Hence he devised an experiment in which a 'teacher' (a subject) had to punish a 'student' (an assistant) for not doing something correctly by administering him an electric shock that would grow in intensity each time the student got it wrong. And he found that despite the student screaming in pain (he didnt actually feel the shocks, just pretended to) when the shock went on and on increasing, and even when it reache dthe fatal 450 volts and the student fell silent, the teacher, despite his misgivings, continued to shock the student at the behest of a mechanical experimenter who was present and who intoned robotically "the study must continue. It must go on". Thus the conclusion was that the young soldiers were thus conditioned into commiting unspeakabl atrocities by seniors who believed in them. Goes to show how impressionable our minds are. And how the adage, Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely is true.

And this is happening in front of our very eyes. These officials, suddenly vested with unexpected power and authority, to even detain a foreigner, a legal passport/document holder (as in the case of Mohammad Shafiq - in this moring's Mumbai Mirror - from Hyderabad travelling frm Dubai to the US for his MBA, not even dressed in their 'suspicious' uniform of traditional Muslim Dress and NOT sporting a beard, was unceremoniously detained and deported back to Mumbai), without giving him a reason for his detention or access to his family or a legal representative, are going to soon, if they are not already, start enjoying their power trip. To have the power over someone's life, someone's future, at the very least an innocent person's immediate travel prospects, without transparency and accountability, is a serious breach of our fundamental human rights.

As to this behavioural study bullshit, how are they going to account for intercultural differences in tone, gesture, interaction, clothing, language, habits? Who judges what is considered normal? White Caucasians with names like Melissa Jones and John Davis? By drawing lines we only create walls, decreasing our tolerance day by day.

Im not saying that only traditional Islamic persons should be profiled. Not at all. Though Im sure we would hasten to use the excuse that we're not Muslim to precipitate our release were we to be detained, and its unfortunate that a religion that has spawned some amazing thinkers, artists and rulers should thus be maligned by a few misled fundamentalist miscreanst. But banning articles and racial profiling are both only short terms solutions, and ones that are hazardous in the long term. Why? Because they fail to address the root cause of the problem. Which is that the more you prohibit or corner people on the basis of a situation or a belief, the more they lash out. This is another fundamental characteristic of human nature. The more you treat people unjustly because of some superficial, rapidly stereotyped anomalies, the more likely are more people of that group likely to turn into those anomalies, gradually making the anomalies the norm. Dont you foolish people in authority see? Whats the point of curing the symptoms when the diagnosisisnt correct? When you're NOT curing the illness? The rot simply sets in deeper, while the outside appears more fakely rosy.

That's essentially the problem with the modern world. Appearances are flimsy, brittle, and the substance of human character and interactions have corroded somewhere amongst all that technological and geographical progress.

I feel sad that a day will come that my husband and I will reminisce and tell our children that when we were young we DIDNT have to remove our shoes in security check. That we were once free. Happy with the world the way it was. Equal.