For more than twenty years travel has been a purpose, a vocation, for me. More than a pastime or a job requirement, it’s simply what I do, and I could tell you why. Maybe I will sometime. For now suffice it to say that, as a reporter, I endorse my colleague Anthony Davis’s observation that “There’s no substitute for the sniff on the ground.” Reading books and crunching numbers are necessary activities, but they can’t substitute for the simple act of showing up and bearing witness.

Which is why I’ve always kept a wary lookout for anything that might limit my freedom to travel. In the 1990s, that time of innocence and excess, I cherished my blue passport and made good use of it as I bounced incessantly around Asia. The world was my oyster in those pre-9/11 days, and I saw every reason to hurry up and explore it. In the middle-class, middle American world I come from, many people - albeit, to their credit, not my parents - tend to see youthful wanderlust in terms of “getting it out of your system” before “settling down.” Put money in the bank now, is the idea, and then when you retire you’ll be able to travel (i.e. go on cruises and/or drive around America in an RV). I considered that mentality myopic and parochial even at the time. Now I really do. As I told a younger journalist colleague recently, the older I get, the more I feel vindicated in the reckless choices I made in my youth.

The thing is, if you get with the program and keep your nose clean, you don’t get rewarded in any terms that I value. More directly to the point, the only good reason to have freedom is to use it, now. Later, you might not have it anymore.

All of which is to say that I’m very glad I did as much traveling as I did in my twenties and thirties, because I wonder how free I, or anyone, will be to travel in the looming future. In Asia, in the good old days, I learned that not only was my blue passport an asset to cherish, but so was my white skin. There were times when I was insouciant and oblivious about it, but I did figure it out. It’s not fair, but it’s true, and it’s a privilege I no longer take lightly. Along with the relative freedom I enjoy - to be blunt, freedom to board airplanes with relatively little fear of being subjected to a humiliating interrogation or full-body search - comes a responsibility to try to speak for people who can’t or, out of fear, won’t speak for themselves.

As I’ve traveled in recent years among the affluent, law-abiding, family values-ish, even boringly suburban denizens of Pakistani North America, I’ve been told many stories, privately, about what they go through when they travel into and out of, and around, the United States. I might compile some of these stories sometime, but for now suffice it to say that not many white people I know would stand for what brown people - U.S. and Canadian citizens - put up with routinely and largely without complaint.

Now, since the “underwear bomber” was foiled on Christmas Day at the airport in Detroit - after inexplicably having been allowed to board without screening in Amsterdam - the New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON — Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.

But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those 14 nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full range of intensified security that was imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.

There’s plenty more to say about this development, and I’ll be sure to continue covering the issue of travel restrictions in this weekly blog. For now, I have to get ready for my daily Urdu class, so I’ll leave it at this: It’s all well and good for white people to say things like, “I don’t mind a bit of inconvenience if it’s making us safer” or “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to fear,” but we don’t know - literally, we don’t know - what brown people are going through. And it really is largely a matter of skin color; these are in many cases our fellow U.S. and Canadian citizens and taxpayers. The least we white people can do is to cultivate an awareness of our position of privilege, and that awareness should teach us a measure of humility.

As usual, the prophetic voices of our time come from marginal communities, where experience tends to be all too directly edifying. Here’s what Haroon Khan, trustee of the Pakistan-Canada Association and the Al-Jamia mosque in Vancouver, said on the Bill Good Show on CKNW radio on January 6: “The amount of security that we’re facing is quite intense, and the full-body scanning really represents a tremendous intrusion on the privacy of all of us in the name of security. … It’s really a dangerous precedent that’s being set and it’s a line that, once we cross it, I’m afraid it’s just the beginning.”

Bon voyage! I welcome your comments on this and any other posts on this blog.

Ethan Casey with Pakistani friends in Minnesota, November 28, 2009. Photo by Munir Abid.

Well, 2009 is finally over and it’s time to turn the page, with big plans and hopes for 2010. As my mother likes to say, life is a constant leaf-turning process. It’s an anxious and melancholy moment in our world, but we’ve gotten used to those, and I think the only effective way to combat the otherwise inevitable, and all too understandable, despair and paralysis is to insist on living in hope – by which I mean not just sitting around choosing to feel hopeful, but turning hope into meaningful and concrete action.

For me, 2009 was all about researching and then writing my new book Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip. It feels as though it’s been a long, hard slog, but at the moment I’m feeling tired in a pleasant and gratifying way, with a big load off my shoulders. If you’re on my email list, you know that throughout the fall I was writing the book while also taking daily Urdu language classes and starting a master’s degree program in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I live, as well as traveling a lot to promote the book project in both mainstream and Pakistani communities across the United States and Canada. November in particular was a crazy month for me, with trips to Orange County and San Diego; Portland; Fort Worth (speaking along with my colleague Fawad Butt at Texas Christian University); and Minneapolis/St. Paul.

The point of all the travel has been to raise awareness of and support for the book ahead of its publication this March, and the point of the book is to encourage – and to participate in – a much-needed conversation between the Muslim world and the West, and specifically between Pakistanis and Americans. From fifteen years’ worth of direct personal experience of Pakistan, I know not only that it’s a country that faces severe challenges – everyone knows that – but that those challenges are different from what most Americans suppose them to be. And I know that Pakistanis are resourcefully rising to the occasion in meeting them, and other Americans need to know that too. And they’re challenges faced by Pakistani people – parents who worry about their children’s education, health and safety, for example, just as American parents do, geopolitics and religion notwithstanding. But of course those things can never quite be notwithstanding; they impinge too much on all of us, especially these days, especially in Pakistan.

If 2009 was, for me, the year of the book, 2010 will be the year of the blog. It’s understandable enough that I haven’t posted on this blog since November, but with the book finished and its publication coming soon, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog weekly. Authors I admire, such as James Howard Kunstler, whose important book The Long Emergency I recommend highly, do this very effectively. From reading Kunstler weekly, I’ve come to see how a blog can supplement and complement a book and vice versa. If, as I say, it’s all about initiating and continuing a needed conversation, then there can be few better ways to do that today than by blogging frequently and on a reliable schedule. For several reasons, I plan to publish a new entry every Tuesday.

I’ll be doing other things too, including plenty more travel around North America. My travel schedule is public on Google calendar as “Ethan Casey’s travel calendar,” or visit the Calendar page of this site. I’ll be in Southern California in late January, visiting several colleges in Colorado in the first half of February, in Texas (Dallas, Houston and hopefully Austin) in the third week of March, and in San Jose and Fresno in early April. If I’m coming to your city – or if you’d like me to – please drop me a note.

Ethan Casey in Port Angeles, Washington, September 12, 2009. Photo by Jim Dries.

There are several concrete ways you can support my work. By all means, invite me to your city if you can – and, if your group’s budget is limited, we can work together creatively to make it worth everyone’s while. I’m starting to schedule my calendar for fall 2010 now. Also, now is a great time to pre-purchase your copy of Overtaken By Events, if you haven’t yet. There are buttons in the upper right corner of this page, and you can buy it singly, or in a package with my previous book Alive and Well in Pakistan, or multiple copies to give to family and friends. All pre-sold copies will be shipped, with a thank-you note from me, in late March or early April, immediately after the book is published.

You also can help by sending the link to this or any other blog entry far and wide, and by otherwise encouraging people you know to visit this website and follow my work.

That’s all for this week – talk to you again next Tuesday!