Next Time I Go to the Post Office I Know What Kind of Stamps I'm Going to Ask For

[queerbychoice]

Look, it's a sequel to the previous link!

Comments

[curare.livejournal.com]

omfg.

[herpuppet.livejournal.com]

That's truly amazing.

I actually went into the post office for stamps a few weeks after 9-11 and asked, in particular, for stamps without flags on them. My postal clerk forked over the liberties and muttered, "Yeah, those flags are getting a bit thick, eh?"

I was impressed. Of course, I was in Santa Cruz.

[elfbabe.livejournal.com]

We used to have nice pretty stamps with four different kinds of flowers on them. They were great! But then they ran out and we got flags. Grrrr.

[djm4]

Ludicrous! They are anecdotes of what might be isolated incidents, but very scary if it's actually a trend.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Living here, inhabiting this atmosphere, I can unfortunately certify that yes, there is a real trend behind the anecdotes. You can smell it in the air, you can see it on the American flags that everybody's houses and cars are still plastered with. The first time I visited my parents after September 11th, I complained to my mother that I wished she hadn't plastered an American flag across the front of the house. She replied, "I thought I'd better put one up somewhere, or the neighbors will think that we're terrorists."

This, from a 100% Caucasian family who could not possibly in anybody's wildest dreams be mistaken for Arabs.

[djm4]

This, from a 100% Caucasian family who could not possibly in anybody's wildest dreams be mistaken for Arabs.

I'm assuming that you personally wouldn't have thought it any more reasonable if they could have been mistaken for Arabs. I take it the neighbours probably didn't have all that complex a view of what an 'Arab' would look like, either.

Personally, I think one thing September 11 changed was the perception that terrorism was something that only affected other countries. Even before that, many Americans I met had the distinct impression that all muslims were terrorists and there were evil communists throughout Europe, but as long as you stayed in the good old US of A, you'd be uncontaminated. The attitude you mention is very familiar to people outside the US - not that that makes me any less sympathetic that you're all suffering it now.

It was very sweet of Dubya to come over to Europe and tell us all to wake up to the terrorist threat, but we've been living with US-sponsored terrorism for a while now, and I didn't see him dropping daisycutters on NORAID. (Yes, I know that's simplistic, but it's about the level of argument that the Axis Of Evil debate operates on).