Editorial

A decade later, we found out that we were supposed to be scared. It was all part of the plan hatched by our president and vice president.
If we were scared, we wouldn't change the channel. If we were scared, we wouldn't ask questions. If we were scared, congress wouldn't ask questions either.
And so went our government from democracy to dictatorship. And we followed suit, because we were scared. We wondered if the neighborhood street vendor would poison the hot dogs, and if cab drivers took flight classes in their spare time.
In doing so, we became increasingly un-American; we took a geographical land-mass filled with unique individuals and labeled it 'evil.'
Just like Bin Laden labeled you and me as 'evil.'
But what are we really? What does it mean to be American?
Said Ralph Linton some seventy-five years ago, in his piece titled "One-Hundred Percent American:"
“Dawn finds the unsuspecting patriot garbed in pajamas, a garment of East Indian origin; and lying in a bed built on a pattern which originated in either Persia or Asia Minor. He is muffled to the ears in un-American materials: cotton, first domesticated in India; linen, domesticated in the Near East; wool from an animal native to Asia Minor; or silk whose uses were first discovered by the Chinese. All these substances have been transformed into cloth by methods invented in Southwestern Asia. If the weather is cold enough he may even be sleeping under an eiderdown quilt invented in Scandinavia.”
What makes us American is the (albeit, sometimes sub-conscious) open-mindedness to recognize others' ideas, the access to locate those ideas and the freedom to choose the best one.
From that environment comes a Liberal Arts college such as Alfred, where we are free to explore any belief without looking over our shoulder.
From an environment of oppression came Al Qaeda; a twisted, fanatical alternative for those who have none, but an alternative nonetheless.
In signing off on a pointless war, we sacrificed our alternatives. But today we have our swagger back.
With the development of social media, we can each offer our own alternative, and within minutes it can garner as many eyes as an A-Rod at-bat.
And so can 'they.'
Giles Kepel, professor of Middle Eastern politics at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and author of "Clash of Civilizations," asserted in a New York Times piece that a rise in social media could lead to the demise of Islamic radicalism and groups like Al Qaeda. Said Kepel:
“(People) pointed at Arabs and Muslims as radically “other”; now we know them to be just like us — they tweet, they’re on Facebook, and the figurehead of the Egyptian revolution is Google’s Middle East manager.”
Through social media, we can see that Muslims are nothing like Osama Bin Laden.
Through social media, they can see that Americans are nothing like narrow-minded, profit-driven oil tycoons.
Through social media, Muslims have an alternative.
Without present alternatives, Al Qaeda was able to tell its people what to think and who to blame.
With increased access, those people can now figure it out for themselves.
For years, we spent billions of dollars in search of a man who was no representative of Arab culture, but rather an outlier. In helping to change his environment from one of oppression in which he thrived to one of freedom to which he is allergic, we have rendered him remote.
For being a recipient of that freedom, I love my country.
For being a purveyor of that freedom, God Bless America.