It was 6:15AM and drizzle was hitting the windshield of the speeding yellow New York cab that was obviously taking us the long way to John F. Kennedy Airport. Our cab driver had no doubt learned the tricks of the trade to earn a few extra dollars from unsuspecting visitors to the Big Apple. My friend and I were getting noticeably irritated; it was taking us forever to get to JFK, even though our hotel was in Queens, where the airport is located. Our plane to Seattle would depart at 7:15am and we had no time to waste.

Biting my fingernails, I gazed out the window and pondered the two weeks I spent in NYC and the massive effect such a short time in one city had had on my life. I had just finished four days as a delegate at the National Model United Nations (NMUN), a meeting of over 4,000 college students from 28 countries and five continents, participating in a mock UN conference and learning about diplomacy and how to work in such a diverse community. Each team of participants represents a country, but not necessarily their own.

I met people from the four corners of the world, and unearthed the truth that while we come in different shapes, colors, and sizes, on the inside we really are all the same. The diplomatic scholars discussing issues of world peace and stability by day in the NMUN conference were the same crazy, hormone-driven lunatics who were beautifully politically incorrect, dancing the crisp New York night away.

They say if you stand in Times Square long enough you will meet people from every race in the world. That week, I met the honorable delegates representing Grenada, Benin, Mauritania and Sri Lanka, to name a few, whose minds blew me away. They revealed themselves and their aliases by night: the Colombian Drug Dealer, the White Boys from Wisconsin, the Russian Mafioso, and the Exotic Mexican Dancer. Not to mention my partner and I, representing South Africa at the NMUN by day, the ‘Ay-rab terrorists’ by night.

Faster than the Germans brought down the Berlin wall, we tore down the superficial barriers that separated us: the curliness of my partner’s hair, the number of earrings the Russian wore, the deep blue eyes of the boys from Wisconsin, the cross that the Mexican bore on her chest, the way I faced the Kaaba before sunrise and right after sunset for moments of solitude with my God. We were able to detach ourselves from the shallow peripherals that we had previously believed to define us.

We learned more from each another in that short period than we would have ever learned from textbooks. We shared insights about our respective cultures to laugh about, admire, relate to and question. We were able to leave each other baffled, amazed, enthralled and even appalled.

We took an immediate liking to one another and were able to do in a few hours what nations and intergovernmental organizations have been trying to achieve for decades. The outer crusts dissolved, the petty differences vanished and there sat a group of diplomats working hand-in-hand and coming up with resolutions that did not cater to a specific race or people; they catered to the whole, to humanity, to us, the citizens of the world.

Our cab arrived at JFK at approximately 6:45am, stirring me from my reverie, and we thanked our cab driver — one of those citizens of the world — for the ride.

My good spirits and goodwill towards man lasted all the way inside the terminal, until the security checkpoint.

“Get your passports ready with your boarding passes,” I heard airport security say. I looked at my blue passport with the American Bald Eagle on the front, noting it was the same as those held by the Caucasian lady in front of me and the Asian family behind me. I felt secure that I fit in perfectly in this great melting pot of nations.

I put my bags through the x-ray machines, just like everyone else; emptied my pockets into the tray and took off my shoes, just like everyone else. I walked through the machine, and it didn’t utter the slightest beep when I passed through, just like everybody else. But I was definitely not like everybody else.

“Sir, you have been randomly selected by airport security for a thorough body and baggage check.”

I did not know whether I was surprised or if the inevitable had just happened. On my way into the little room where they humiliate you by making you lift your arms and legs into funny angles so they can stick metal detectors in areas you did not know you had, I saw the reflection of my Middle-Eastern features with a three-day old scruffy beard smirking back at me in the glass door.

The man asked pointless questions about my whereabouts, my reasons for being in New York and my reasons for flying to Seattle. He had my entire family history dating to forefathers whose names I did not know. He knew about my house in Egypt, the UAE and California. He was trying to familiarize himself with my travels and questioned why I was in Saudi Arabia two summers ago. He flinched as I explained the umrah, the lesser pilgrimage to Mecca.

I decided there was no reason to lose my temper. I answered every question clearly and concisely, so as not to waste any time and not to miss my flight. The interrogator was aimlessly trying to get me riled up, trying to coerce me into saying something I did not mean or that could possibly incriminate me. But I kept a cool head and decided he was merely doing his job.

It did not take long for NYPD to arrive, with the good people from Homeland Security joining the fun shortly after, poking at anything they could get at. I did not crack, shout or show discomfort.

The airport security officer started questioning where I stayed when I visited California. I told him we stayed at our house, which we were currently renting to family friends. He looked around at his friends and said to me with a laugh “So, you and your family like to live in the backyard?” That was my boiling point.

Still, I held it all in. I did not say a word until security had booked us another flight to replace the one we had missed. I then walked back to the man who had thought it would be fun to talk about my family living in a backyard, pointed straight at his face, looked him in the eyes and gave it to him straight.

I told him that it was people like him that spread hate in the country I call home. I told him that I would not tolerate racial slurs and bigotry based solely on my Arab ethnicity. I told him that he had not been brought up to be a proper American, because he did not understand, as the Pledge of Allegiance teaches, the notion of one nation, “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

I was suddenly angry that I was an American. I told the guard, who was African American, how appalled I was to see that the KKK had taken on another form, and explained, calmly but firmly, that it was he, not I, that America should be afraid of, because the only threats I had seen that morning were the words coming out of his mouth.

I was not angry; I was disappointed. I did not threaten to report him to his superiors for my personal satisfaction; I needed him to understand that fire is never combated with fire, and that imperialism has to end somewhere.

I left him with a broken look in his eye. I was not proud of myself. I did not laugh with content.

On the plane to Seattle, I again remembered that we were all citizens of the world, but the glow was gone. I was disappointed that a group of people aged 19–23 could confront the world’s problems so diplomatically, while a man with a badge could be so openly racist in an airport terminal.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “you must be the change that you wish to see in the world.” I know that I did not change much that day at the airport, but to him, it counts. He will remember. et