Political Animal

I've followed politics since I was in middle school. I've also been politically inert, more or less, since middle school.

My younger sister is currently working on a high school assignment in which she is required, as I understand it, to interview just about anyone on a civil rights-related subject. I interned for the Council of American-Islamic Relations one summer while I was in college, so she asked if she could interview me.

I complied, with some misgivings. My internship at CAIR is my only experience with political activism of any sort to date. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Not because of the work I did, mind--it was a relaxed work-from-home internship in which I wrote a report on various discriminatory tactics practiced by American law enforcement agencies. While the backlash against the American Muslim population post-9/11 has never been as severe as I feared, there's no question that the U.S. government has found a variety of ways to officially screw over Muslims. The manner in which the FBI and the DHS have ridden roughshod over their civil liberties colors my perspective to this day, and researching the subject was an eye-opening experience for me.



Rather, I look back on my CAIR work with discomfort because I'm not sure that I'm completely on board with CAIR's larger agenda. While I consider many federal and state anti-terrorism policies deeply questionable on ethical and Constitutional grounds, I also don't oppose keeping a closer eye on the political climate in American Muslim communities than the government did pre-9/11. I'm also a deeply secular person who has no love for the Abrahamic faiths. While I think that CAIR provides valuable pushback against some sketchy practices, I'm not convinced it was appropriate for me to be involved in that pushback.

It's this sort of problem that's kept me out of the political sphere. Given how high the stakes are, I just can't commit to a cause that I don't believe in 100%. And there isn't a cause I believe in 100%.

I feel some considerable guilt when I think about this subject. In theory, my hoity-toity political science education should allow me to think trenchantly about the current state of American society, decide on a set of operating principles, and sketch out a plan of action by which I help to effect the changes I'd like to see made. But if anything, I have fewer firm political ideals than I did before I went off to school, and the problems that America faces seem more daunting (given that I left for college in 2006, they actually are more daunting). When I'm not paralyzed by shades of grey, I'm paralyzed by my own lack of detailed knowledge of the issues at hand--I completely avoided talking to friends about Obamacare because I don't feel competent to judge either side of the debate. I feel like a fence-sitter at best and complicit in the decay of our society at worst.

This attitude can be healthy in some respects. People who claim to have simple solutions to big social problems are usually snake-oil salesmen, and I don't respect those who stampede into partisanship just so they can construct a sense of purpose for themselves. But at the end of the day, I know that I've never committed to politics because, in my comfy middle-class life, I've never been forced to. Given the way things are going, my fence-sitting days may be numbered.