Guest Editorial: My Kittens…Your Money
Before the public admission that our government was spying on its own citizens, my family had long suspected that our phones might well be tapped.
This essay is a public apology.
America, I would like to apologize to you personally. Thousands, perhaps millions of your tax dollars have gone to listening to me babble about the kittens that my fiance was fostering. Countless man hours have been wasted trying to decipher just who are the Katzenjammer twins and why one of them was sleeping in my underwear drawer. Why had Mukesh urinated on the carpet and why indeed did we keep insisting that Cardinal Ratzinger was the most social? And how many hours were spent musing on the inane talk about Nip/Tuck… perhaps some NSA spook wondered ceaselessly about who the Carver was and why Matt got beat up by transsexuals… was it all some bewildering code?
My family and I are Pasthuns. This is the ethnic group that inhabits the area where Bin Laden is believed to have been (or still is) hiding. Our frequent telephone calls to that region of Pakistan could not, certainly, go unnoticed. Augmenting our suspicious origins, my father made the mistake of using the word “anthrax” while speaking Urdu with a Pakistani phone operator. The Pakistani operator had asked my father, a U.S. citizen for more than half of his life, just what the heck was going on in America during the anthrax scare of ’01. There is no word for “anthrax” in Urdu, so my father and the Pakistani operator both used the English word in their discussion. The American oversees operator, who had connected them initially and was still monitoring the call (constant vigilance!) immediately disconnected the call. She announced her intention to call the CIA, FBI and the John Birch Society on my bewildered father.
Since that day our phone clicks and frequently disconnects. There are also odd echoes and in my ear, an imagined whisper of, “Go about your business, no one is watching you.”
We have all been damaged by the events of September 11, 2001. In one way or another it has touched all of our lives. Many of the governmental policies that have emerged as a response to these events are misguided and damaging. It is time to heal as a country, time to reevaluate our security while keeping our eyes on our goal. Terror and terrorists, not Muslims, are the enemies of America and terror comes in many forms and disguises. If our goal is the protection and spread of liberty, we must question whether domestic spying is truly moving us in the right direction.
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