We need to get out of the weeds of blame in the Ahmed Mohamed case, and over his sudden celebrity as well. He is a story, but not the story we need to understand. But we’ll start with him.
In the week of September 11th the case of Ahmed Mohamed of Irving rocketed, in 48 hours, to national prominence. A young man with an inquiring mind and a natural impulse to please his teachers found that his homemade clock didn’t get the reaction he expected. After showing it to his science teacher, who recognized it for what it was, he found himself forced to show it to an English teacher, who was clueless and suspicious, and a principal, who was more clueless and suspicious and called the police. They reported that they found the young man suspicious, and he was arrested and taken from the school in handcuffs. For possession of what was no more than a science fair project.
As soon as the news got out it ripped through the twitter verse and Facebook pages. Within 24 hours President Obama has weighed in with a tweet supporting Ahmed and both the principal who called the police and the police were desperately trying to explain their actions. While support for Ahmed was overwhelming in the public realm, there were naturally those who praised the school authorities for being vigilant, those who defended the school and police as simply following regulations, and those who naturally thought that any young dark skinned man named Mohamed was probably up to no good in any case.
But let’s look at the big picture. Irving is a suburb in the midst of intense social change representative of what is happening both across the United States and particularly North of Dallas. Only a few miles further out in Farmersville plans to purchase property for a Muslim cemetery exploded into both controversy and Islamophobia. Which was also the case in Garland before that. Irving’s mayor herself encouraged Islamophobia in her community by supporting a city council resolution supporting a meaningless state law intended as a backhanded attack on Islamic law. And those state laws were in turn sponsored by legislators representing the Dallas suburbs; legislators who also sponsored meaningless legislation to somehow save clergy from being forced to perform same-sex weddings.
And these two kinds of legislation are of a piece because national security and the possibility of a terrorist attack aren’t the problem any more than same-sex marriage is a threat to society or religion. These laws are simply a way to focus anxiety on groups that are themselves simply proxies for the reality that society at every level is changing more rapidly than either individuals or institutions can easily adapt.
I doubt that the police, the principal, or even the English teacher who first reported Ahmed really thought ill of the young man. Yet a public school, like every other public institution, is a center of social change and the anxiety that accompanies it. That anxiety settled out on Ahmed and his clock two days ago. And from there on it was anxiety that drove events, not a realistic assessment of either the clock or the boy. It could have as easily been a gay child being bullied or an African American student being treated like a criminal.
American anxiety is easily be directed toward many different groups. African Americans are a perennial target for American anxiety, now being joined by Latinos and even Asians. Gays also serve this purpose as well. In the not too distant past it was Jews and communists, and that isn’t over yet.
And as is always the case, those who deal in islamophobia, racism, homophobia, and anti-semitism offer what appear to be rational reasons for blaming these different groups for larger social ills. And they may even believe these reasons themselves – part of the disease of anxiety is that it blinds a society to self-understanding.
But more often in America politicians are the masters of using anxiety. They use it to gather votes from among the anxious by identifying a cause and promising that they will expel it or control it and thus cure us. It is a false promise, indeed a political lie. Nothing that can be done about, to, or with Muslims, gays, Jews, Latinos, Blacks, or any other group is going to cure our national anxiety.
The only cure is to overcome our fear of change, to embrace it and social diversity as a path to a better future for us all. That isn’t impossible. Getting to know our neighbors of different religions and ethnicities and sexual orientations can quite quickly teach us the advantages of having both their unique personalities and cultural gifts to strengthen and enliven our society. They become the way we invest ourselves in the future rather than have our fear drag us into the past.
It is a pity that instead of addressing the real cause of our anxiety, Irving’s civic leaders, like our Texas politicians from the governor downward have sought to use anxiety as a political tool to gather votes among the most anxious of Texans by casting blame on politically weak minorities. They should address and relieve anxiety by encouraging a positive view of the value of diversity and by encouraging more social engagement across communities.
In the great scheme of things anxiety, however it settles out on an individual or group, and however much that individual or group is shunned, persecuted and cast out, anxiety will endure while social change continues. And because that social change will not end, anxiety will eat away at those who are anxious until they shrivel and die in their failure to be part of a future whose arrival is inevitable. And maybe, given our current political (and for that matter religious) leadership that is simply the way it will be, until the Ahmed’s of our nation lead us to the stars and the dust swirls over the forgotten graves of those chose fear over hope.
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