This is not America

 My friends keep telling the same joke, and they don't know each other. I've told the joke, and nobody asks me what I mean.

The joke goes like this: you don't know who's listening.

Even just talking to people about mundane things, there are little hints that we know someone might be listening to what we say. The next part of the joke is some expression of please don't take me to a holding cell, mister. These are our jokes.

These are just jokes. It is very unlikely that any one of us would be spied on by Homeland Security, because--why? Because they know we are not terrorists? No, because it costs money and time to spy on indivuals. It is easy to spy on a population, just put some cameras out. To spy on a person, to actually pay someone to sit and pay attention to an average person's phone calls and emails, that's just stupid. Unless that person is a terrorist.

But I'm not a terrorist. None of my friends are terrorists. If we saw a terrorist planting a bomb, we would shoot him ourselves before we even called the police. There's no terrorist problem here in my corner of south Alabama. Shit, the Arabs I know would shoot the bastard for making people hate Arabs, even if he wasn't an Arab. Nobody is worried about the Department of Homeland Security paying attention to them because they're afraid DHS might find out they're terrorists. They're afraid, though. Nervous, more like. Nervous about what it might mean just to give DHS a reason to pay attention to them.

The jokes are like what we make down here about hurricanes. Thank God there hasn't been another one here. But it's not like no one talked about it. We thought it was a dead certainty. So we joke. Like we joke about being taken to jail for something we say on the phone. We joke about being taken to jail for a joke.

The punchline of the joke is always that we're not really going to be taken to jail. This isn't a night in the drunk tank. This is a suite at Guantanamo, but we're not south Asian, so we would end up in some police station basement somewhere, being beaten and told what to say and where to sign. We joke that we would be tortured into confessing anything.

People online from central America sometime laugh at us, I notice. They laugh and joke because we haven't realized yet that things have changed. They know what we have become. It's a common story where they come from. They never thought it would happen here, but now that it has, they think it's kind of cute that we don't realize what has happened to us.

All I know is, if six years ago I made a joke that if someone heard what I said I would be tortured, there would have been no real question in anyone's mind I was not serious. It wouldn't be considered possible, except for the black helicopter crowd.

Speaking of which...