Memoir

After reading We Are All Suspects Now, i felt guilty that something like this could actually happen in the US. But it does not really surprise me that things like this actually happen. Throughout highschool, when we were learning about US and World History, we would constantly read about how leaders would torture or detain people without legal permission. It really made me wonder how much our own modern government has been doing to deal with the threat of terrorism, whether they have also gone to the same extremes as the people that we have read about in history books, and how even if this did happen, we are so out of the loop that we will probably never hear about anything that the government might have done.
This reminded me about a friend that i knew a long time ago when i was 5 years old. I had been in America for about 6 months. I spoke very little English at the time and could only understand the most basic speech. I lived in the projects of Cambridge with three other families in a small apartment. One of those families was from Pakistan. I was friends with their son, who i used to play with all the time. Since we still didnt have school yet, we played outside all day. Then one day i saw their family packing up. When i asked my mother what was happening, she only replied that they were going to go back to Pakistan. I didn't really think about it after. During 6th grade, we had to do a project on people that we knew during our childhood. That prompted me to reask my parents about the story. I was then told that they had been questioned about possible terrorist ties, and they had then been deported after being found to have no connection to terrorists.
I now realize that what happened to this family is the exact same thing as what happened to the various people in the book. How these things were overlooked so easily until i heard the truth. In my case, it was because i was too young to understand. But there must be so many other cases that due to lack of received information, and how many other occurences like these have been kept away from the ears of the public.