The first time I learned about Afghanistan was when I was nine and the war began. As part of the pro-invastion rhetoric, a lot of time was spent talking about how oppressive their regime was, how poor the people were, and how the United States needed to help them by installing McDonald's and introducing booty shorts (or whatever our democracy plans were). I remember thinking, "Why haven't I heard about this before? I mean, this country didn't just appear suddenly after 9/11 did it?" As I got older it became clearer: the United States government and media has a nasty habit of championing issues when and only when they can be used as a smoke screen for our interests.
In other words, we suddenly care about things when we can use them as poster issues.
Take women's rights, for example. All of a sudden we cared about the state of women in Afghanistan. All of a sudden Afghan women were a top national priority. Nobody cared about them before, but once opposition to the war broke out, "women's rights" magically became the reason we were invading. Anyone who didn't support the war, in addition to being a terrorist and anti-patriot, hated women. Except here's the problem: we never did anything to actually help. We played the colonial game and built buildings, then knocked them down with our bombs. But what makes me the most annoyed is the fact that the same people saying, "We have to rescue the Afghan women," are the ones fighting against reproductive rights and equal pay here in the United States. There's a great SNL quote: Amy Pohler as Hillary Clinton says, "I'm here to talk about sexism, which is an issue I'm surprised people suddenly care about." Afghan women are a means to an end in this situation: they are means of justifying an unnecessary war. We need them to construct our identity as "the good guys." We need them so we can be the opposite of them.
The West in general participates in binary thinking: us v. them, black v. white, male v. female. We are defining ourselves based on what we are not. We are better than this country because our women don't wear veils. Rather than evaluating ourselves, good and bad, we pick a different culture and pick it apart to assert superiority. In WW II it was the Japanese, in the Cold War it was the Russians, and now it's the Middle East.
The United States exists as the other half of a binary rather than an entity in and of ourselves. We need to stop saying, "This is what we are not," and start saying "This is what we are." We need to stand FOR something rather than standing AGAINST it. Maybe then we'll actually start caring about issues all the time, and not just when it's convenient.
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