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Health & Fitness

I Am An American

My thoughts and reflections as a Middle Eastern Arab-American after the Boston bombings.


I am an American.

I am an immigrant.

I have the facial features and skin tone that will make you tackle me if I’m running away from a bomb scene rather than tending to my wounds and comforting me until medical assistance got there. I speak a “different” language and have just the slightest accent in English that will make you look at me suspiciously while standing in line to board a plane.

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I have two young sons. My oldest, who turns 6 this summer, plays Little League Baseball. I drive a Ford and my wife drives a Chevy. I own a dog. Nothing can be more American than that, except for apple pie, which I enjoy warm with vanilla ice cream on top. A la mode.

Those are my struggles.

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I came to America in the fall of 1999. I was born and raised in Amman, Jordan. It’s a tiny country in the Middle East that is as big as Maine and has a population roughly the same as Indiana’s. I am a Greek Orthodox Christian, although I go to a Catholic church, when I do go. But that does not make feel any safer when I get
certain looks, especially right after a horrendous event has occurred.

I am lucky to live in an area of the USA where most people are progressive and have a relatively higher level of global understanding. But I can never tell what a person is thinking when he or she takes a second look at me, while I’m out buying groceries or filling up my car with gas. I try not to think about it. Most
times I succeed. But then a tragedy like Boston happens, and I am reminded once
again that in the eyes of a lot of my fellow Americans, I am the foreigner. The
usual suspect.

My heart aches when terrorists commit their heinous acts, especially when they do them on American soil. My first thoughts go out to the victims and their families. But something’s terribly wrong when the very next thought I have is that I hope the perpetrators are “domestic” or have nothing to do with or anything close to the Middle East or Islam. Even though I am a Christian Arab, I don’t think that matters if someone wanted to harm me as retribution. I don’t think they will
stop to make sure I am a Muslim if they’re out for vengeance.

Yes, I do think about all that. I remember clearly right after 9/11, not only were Arabs in some areas harassed and even abused, people from Indian origins
were affectd too. In fact a Sikh man was killed just because he was
wearing a turban.  He wasn’t an Arab. He wasn’t even a Muslim. Other men in his family feared so much for their lives that they took off their turbans. The guy that shot him shouted as he was taken into custody “I am a patriot!”

Again, something is terribly wrong when members of the Sikh community have to take off their turbans for fears for their lives. A turban, or a Dastar, is a mandatory headwear for all baptized Sikh men and is a symbol of their faith, piety and courage.

Right after the Boston bombing, a Saudi man was tackled while running away from the scene of the bomb. Although a lot of people ran towards the injured, I can see how the natural reaction would be to run away from something as scary as a bomb explosion. I can also see that if the man were not dark skinned, maybe he would have been helped and his injuries looked at. Instead, he was taken to the hospital, interrogated, his apartment searched and his roommate questioned for 5 hours by the authorities.

What if that happened to me? What if I was there standing at the finish line in Boston cheering and encouraging the runners? I don’t know how I would react. I asked myself that question many times. Would I have run away? Or towards the injured? I’d like to think that I’d run towards the injured and try to help as best I
can. But maybe instead, flight instinct kicks in and I run away in
the opposite direction of danger. Would I have been tackled? My wife
questioned? My kids taken away to child services?

I don’t want to think about all those questions and the many more swirling in my head. But I do. A lot. And the hypothetical answers scare me. How would I feel if that were to happen? I would feel betrayed, that’s for sure. Betrayed by the country I call home now, and have been calling it that for almost 14 years.

I still remember clearly right after 9/11 how badly I felt, and how scared I felt for my own safety at the same time. For a couple of weeks I didn’t leave my apartment except to go to work. First thing I did was I bought two American flags and hung them on my car. I used to wear a cross necklace all the time, and I
started wearing it on top of my shirts, so that people can see I’m a Christian. Again, not knowing if that would stop anyone wanting to hurt me, but it gave me some comfort. I was single then, no kids or family to worry about.

Now I have a family. I am responsible for two adorable boys. I don’t want them to ever have to feel that they need to hide their identity or their ancestry if any similar situation should arise in their future. I really hope that we never have to go through anything this traumatic, but I also really don’t want my kids to be
targeted just because their skin tone and their eye color are a little darker.

You’ll never guess what the scariest movie I ever saw is! No, it’s not The Shining or The Exorcist of Friday the 13th (or any of its 11 iterations, at the time I’m
writing this)! No, the scariest movie I ever saw, and it still haunts me until
today, is The Siege. It is a movie about a string of terrorist attacks in New
York City, that ends up forcing the President to declare martial law and the US
Army to round up all Middle Eastern men in the city and detain them in cages in
Yankee Stadium, including the son of one of the FBI agents working the case.

What scared me the most about the movie is the miniscule possibility of it happening in any city, at any point in time. Who knows? Maybe the government does have contingency plans similar to the movie’s plot hatched and ready to be used and implemented if the need should ever arise.

That movie scared the living daylights out of me. And that’s when I was single. Now that I have kids, boys, it scares me even more. I don’t want that kind of possibility in their future. I don’t want them always looking over their shoulder when something bad happens and people start looking left and right for someone to blame and exact vengeance against.

I will try to shield them from all this. I just hope that things never get out of hand. What we need is more understanding and less prejudice. More tolerance, less instanteous judgment. Someone once said that brown is the new black. It doesn’t have to be that way. We have the power to change the future if we act in the present. That’s my message of hope. That’s what I cling to. For my kids.

After all, besides Native Americans, aren’t we all immigrants? I am. I am an American too.

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