support for the complicated and unique internal political processes that can build in each a domestic consensus to combat extremists -- who, after all, typically kill more locals than they do anyone else. International pressure and encouragement can help secure such a consensus. But it cannot be dispatched on the back of a Hellfire missile fired by a robot aircraft piloted by an operator sitting halfway around the world in Nevada.

As I watch over and over the mobs in New York and Washington, I fear two things. One is that too many Pakistanis are too traumatised to lay aside their anger and frustration. "WE HATE AMERICANS!!!" a Pakistani I don't know personally told me on Facebook, just as I was finishing this piece. When I pointed out that I'm American and asked if he hated me, he replied, "I hate all of u!!" The other thing I fear is that too few Americans appreciate the difference between global war and a giant football game

Know what's more important than "mutual respect"? Destroying those that wish to destroy us. Fortunately, you bleeding heart liberals are far outnumbered by people who don't give a rats a#$ about what the world thinks of us.

Russia crushes liberty [according to British propaganda]. The British, despite having crushed liberty in the princely states in India, do not see themselves in quite the same light. For freedom's sake, they must conquer Central Asia. ... The reality is that it's a pipe dream. ... [A misunderstood and overblown intelligence find] allows an ideologically driven group of hawks to have the war that they're already determined to have. ... And, rather like Wolfowitz in 2001, it all looks as if it's a done deal. And in that smugness lie the seeds of their undoing. ... Another thing that happens - of course this would never happen today -- is that they think they've secured Afghanistan, so they go off and invade someplace else. ... The regiments that are deserted by their British officers in the Khord Kabul [Pass] are the regiments that rise up first in 1857. ... But the British can't let this go, because they know that if they do, they'll lose their Indian empire.

Should Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42 be read as an account of the first Afghan war in its own right, or as a cautionary tale in the context of Afghanistan today? The question is pointless -- the answer is "yes" to both options -- because all history is written with at least implicit reference to its author's own times. And William Dalrymple is helpfully willing to be quite explicit on this point: He acknowledged to Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian that there was "an element of calculation" in the book's timing; and near the end of the book itself he writes that, "despite all the billions of dollars handed out [since 2001], the training of an entire army of Afghan troops and the infinitely superior weaponry of the occupiers, the Afghan resistance succeeded again in first surrounding then propelling the hated Kafirs into a humiliating exit."

It's hard to be much more explicit than that but, perhaps aware that Americans sometimes need things to be spelled out very explicitly indeed, just three days before the book's April 16 U.S. publication date, Dalrymple published a New York Times op-ed in which he quoted a recent Taliban press release that claimed: "Everyone knows how Karzai was brought to Kabul and how he was seated on the defenseless throne of Shah Shuja. So it is not astonishing that the American soldiers are making fun of him. ... It is the philosophy of invaders that they scorn their stooge at the end." But in order to appreciate the effectiveness of that nugget of Taliban propaganda, you need to know who Shah Shuja was. "We may have forgotten the details of the colonial history that did so much to mold Afghans' hatred of foreign rule," commented Dalrymple, "but the Afghans have not."

In Return of a King, Dalrymple has done again what he did magnificently for two other telling episodes of British imperial history in White Mughals (2002) and The Last Mughal (2006). He told Jeffries that he sees the three books "very much as the East India Company trilogy," and that is a very correct and useful way to see them. Until further notice, the trilogy must be read and assessed as the crowning achievement of Dalrymple's career.

Any summary a reviewer could offer would be the merest potted version of what took the author years of research to stitch together, so I prefer to urge you to read the book itself. A professor who assigned The Last Mughal in a university class I attended a couple of years ago described it as "a ripping good yarn," which is a way of saying that Dalrymple has a narrative gift. The aesthetic enjoyment we find in such books is a good thing in itself, and of course it's important at the same time to keep in mind both the horrific reality of the events they depict and their enduring relevance: Mark Twain's hoary but true adage that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Another professor recently told me he's already getting blank stares from students when he refers to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Our choice as a species is either to yield to the understandable ignorance of each new generation, and our proclivity to indulge and enforce forgetfulness of our embarrassments, or to resist these. This is why the study of history is important. Dalrymple makes it enjoyable by writing well and engagingly, but it's up to us as readers to meet him halfway. I would add that it's important to write and read at book length, because narration is a truer facsimile of historical reality than bullet points or video or tweets.

The history of human folly rhymes back through Saigon in 1975 and Dien Bien Phu in 1954, through Delhi in 1857 and Kabul in 1842, Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, et cetera, all the way back to the fall of Rome. Indeed there's something Gibbonian about Dalrymple's three history books, much less in the tone -- Dalrymple is not orotund but friendly and patient -- than in the fondness for footnotes and, more basically, in the cautionary intention.

Americans need to refer first not to Rome, though, but to Vietnam, which our society never dealt with honestly before plunging into similar tragic follies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed reading Return of a King, with its author's insistence on documenting the myopia of many of the British political and military leaders of the time, kept bringing to mind The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China (1975) by Clyde Edwin Pettit (alternate subtitle: The Book That Proves There Are None), which is nothing but 439 pages of mostly myopic quotations, artfully selected and arranged to constitute a chilling and implicitly incisive narrative. The fact that Pettit's masterpiece is largely forgotten is very much to the point, and so is the fact that it shouldn't be.

(Speaking of Saigon, and the South Vietnamese who were abandoned as the helicopters lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy almost exactly 38 years ago -- on April 30, 1975 -- just as I was finishing this review I saw this headline featured prominently on the New York Times website: "Afghan Interpreters for the U.S. Are Left Stranded and at Risk.")

ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called "intelligent and compelling" by Mohsin Hamid and "wonderful" by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) . His next book, Home Free: An American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancasey.author. Join his email list here.

It's also unhelpful to all of us, because issues between Americans and Muslims are not a matter of "us" versus "them": millions of Americans are also Muslims, and vice versa. We're all in it together, whether we like it or not.

I don't have anything new to say in the context of the Boston bombing. That's why this statement is short. But each new incident represents both a need and a fresh opportunity to say the same things over again: We're all in it together; there is no "us" versus "them"; Muslims and Americans are not each other's enemies; the fact that terrorism is wrong does not excuse bigotry. All of these things will remain true even, and especially, if the perpetrators of the Boston bombing turn out to be Muslims.

My concern with and interest in the Muslim world is a function partly of the times we live in, but it also has a particular origin in my friendship with Pakistanis, and with Pakistan as a society, which dates back at this point almost 20 years. On March 23, in a speech to the Pakistan Association of America in Troy, Michigan, I said:

The Daily Telegraph's reviewer of my book Alive and Well in Pakistan understood my real purpose -- perhaps even better than I did at the time -- when he observed that "The author's real journey is a search for common humanity." I'm still on that journey, still on that search. And I'm glad to report that I have been finding the common humanity that I went looking for.

As God says in the Quran: "I made you nations and tribes, that you might know one another." Common humanity is not always a lovely thing to find, when we do find it. But finding it in each other is the first step in remembering that terrorism, danger, evil and other bad things are not unique to any particular human category.

One last thing -- but an important one -- to keep in mind is that ordinary people in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world are much closer to the physical, political and other dangers inflicted by terrorism than most of us in the U.S. will ever be. Bomb blasts are an ugly but common fact of life -- not quite routine, but far from exotic or unusual -- in South Asia, and they have been since long before 9/11. April 19 will be the 18th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. In Delhi a few days after that incident, a Kashmiri friend exclaimed to me: "There was bomb blast in America!" What surprised him was not that there had been a bomb blast, but that there had been a bomb blast in America, of all places.

We should keep in mind two things about Oklahoma City, which took place more than six years before 9/11: That it was widely assumed at first that the bomber must have been a Muslim, and that Timothy McVeigh turned out to be a white American. Terrorism is not Islamic.

Here are links to a few of the things I've written in the wake of similar incidents in the recent past:

•  "Newtown Is a Village in Pakistan," Dec. 18, 2012 on my website and on Huffington Post
• "The Wisconsin Sikh Killings and an America Worth Fighting For," Aug. 6, 2012 on my website and on Huffington Post
• "The Colorado Killer Is Not a Muslim," July 20, 2012 on my website and on Huffington Post
• "Muslims in America: Time for a Movement?", Oct. 24, 2010
• "Some of My Best Friends Are Pakistanis," May 4, 2010, the day of the Times Square bombing

I've been wanting to say that for a while, but it's hard to get a word in edgewise, what with all the other people who have things to say about drones lately. I happen to be writing this in South Carolina, home state of Senator Lindsey Graham, who just the other day caused a ripple in the national and international media by telling a small-town Rotary Club, "We've killed 4,700 [with drones]. Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war, and we've taken out some very senior members of al Qaeda."

The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph described Senator Graham's comments as "the first time a politician or any government representative had referred to a total number of fatalities in the drone strikes, which have been condemned by rights groups as extrajudicial assassinations." Graham may or may not regret having spoken unguardedly, and I don't doubt that he does hate the fact that drones kill innocent people. I do too, and so do you, whatever your views on the issues drones are supposed to be helping address. Drone pilots do too, which is why, as the New York Times tells us, they "get mental health problems much like those of pilots deployed to combat." One or more of the big pharmaceutical companies might well be working on something to help drone pilots deal with their "stress disorders" (I quote the quasi-medical cant phrase from the Times's headline), but no pill can fix their -- or our -- real problem, which is not medical or instrumental or even political, but moral. Drones and drone strikes are just plain wrong.

The other New York Times headline that has me up writing this at four in the morning is "U.S. Opens Niger Drone Base, Building Africa Presence." It's necessary to live in the world as it is, and I know that whatever I say or write will have no effect on the deployment or use or effects of drones; they will now be used in Africa, and the Times is doing what the Times does as the house organ of the American establishment: just letting us know. As a friend of mine said in a different (but not so different) context years ago, "'You are powerless, you have no power.' That's what they're saying."

The message is that drones are here to stay and that, by definition, if you're not prepared to get with the program, you're on your own. It can be dispiriting to be reminded of this, but it's also a simple statement of the obvious. Evil deeds, such as terrorism and drone attacks, arise out of the dark depths of human nature, and each of us is intangibly but inevitably implicated in them. And They -- whoever They are -- are not asking for our approval or advice, but requiring our acquiescence.

So why not simply acquiesce? Because, as the American writer Wendell Berry said in a different (but not so different) context years ago, "Protest that endures ... is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence." In other words, the requirements of self-respect should trump those of Them. My late mentor Clyde Edwin Pettit told me Vietnam had taught him that "all governments are bad." Or, as he put it in the foreword to his 1975 masterpiece The Experts: 100 Years of Blunder in Indo-China, "The Vietnam War is a textbook example of history's lessons: that there is a tendency in all political systems for public servants to metamorphose into public masters, surfeited with unchecked power and privilege and increasingly overpaid to misgovern."

I included both of the quotes above in my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, which was published nearly ten years ago now. My point in both quoting them then and wheeling them out again now is that, amid all the sound and fury of this or any other time, some questions and truths are in fact unchanging, and if we don't hold onto these, we risk destroying not only each other but ourselves. Such truths are universal, and they also have particular national and local applications. As someone who has been blessed for nearly two decades by the friendship of many Pakistanis and of Pakistan as a society, the word "sickened" is far too mild to describe how I feel about the damage drone attacks are doing in and to Pakistan. And as an American who loves my own country, I'm concerned with the question of whether America is a free country -- which I was raised to believe was the point of America -- or some sort of consensual military dictatorship.

Which is why I find myself left utterly cold -- chilled, even -- when, as happens routinely these days, airlines invite active-duty military personnel to board planes ahead of the rest of us, along with pregnant women and people rich enough to buy first-class tickets. Or when, as I did last Thursday night, I pass beneath a huge banner reading:

The State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta

Welcome Our Troops Home

I have at least one relative and several friends and acquaintances who are serving or have served in the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You probably do too. I don't condemn them for being there, and whatever they think, in the privacy of their own thoughts, about what they're doing is their own business. I look forward to welcoming them home safely. But I have enough hard-earned, ground-level authority in that part of the world and elsewhere to know how tragically unhelpful their continuing presence there is, and I don't like being bullied into expressions of pious jingoism by craven politicians and commercial airlines.

But at least the soldiers are there in person. The rest of American society is using them to keep our dirty work at arm's length, exactly the way a young man with a joystick in Nevada uses a drone flying over Pakistan. No wonder we're all suffering from stress disorders.

ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), called "magnificent" by Ahmed Rashid and "wonderful" by Edwidge Danticat. He is also the author of Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010) and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012) and co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). His next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.

The British writer Robert Harris is a throwback to this tradition: a novelist who embraces a public role -- more for his books than for himself as a celebrity or personality -- and who aspires both to entertain and to edify. None other than Nelson Mandela has called him "a writer who handles suspense like a literary Alfred Hitchcock." He works with aplomb in several genres, from the fascinating counterfactual Nazi thriller Fatherland, to a fun and gripping imagining of Roman life and bureaucracy in Pompeii, to a brilliant, queasily political contemporary murder mystery involving a lightly fictionalized Tony Blair in The Ghost. Across an impressively wide range of subjects, Harris brings to bear a distinctively British blend of political shrewdness and lightly carried but impressive and genuine erudition. He's one of those Englishmen who really did study Latin at one of those fancy high schools, but who is well-bred enough not to leave his less couth reader feeling inferior for not having done so.

Lustrum (2010), retitled Conspirata for its U.S. edition, makes good use of its author's presumptive classical education. A sequel to Harris's wonderful previous novel Imperium, it purports to be a portion of a recently unearthed candid memoir written by Tiro, slave and private secretary to the great Roman statesman and orator Cicero. The device provides a delicious fly-on-the-wall vantage for Harris to imagine, and us to witness, what really went on in the late days of the Roman Republic. It's like watching a political multi-chariot pile-up.

Part of the fun of historical fiction generally, and a big part of the point of this novel in particular, is that we know all too well how things turned out in real life. There's a lot of truth in the truism that historical fiction is really about the present day. "There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events," reflects Tiro (and through him Harris, of course) at one point. "If my work has a moral, this is it." Forty pages later, in case the reader hasn't gotten the message yet, there's this:

Cicero sighed and said, more to himself than to any of us, "I wonder what men will make of us a thousand years from now. Perhaps Caesar is right -- this whole republic needs to be pulled down and built again. I tell you, I have grown to dislike these patricians as much as I dislike the mob -- and they haven't the excuse of poverty or ignorance." And then again, a few moments later: "We have so much -- our arts and learning, laws, treasure, slaves, the beauty of Italy, dominion over the entire earth - and yet why is it that some ineradicable impulse of the human mind always impels us to foul our own nest?" I surreptitiously made a note of both remarks.

Such didactic points are well-taken, but Harris is too good a storyteller to lay them on thick. Lustrum is the best sort of historical fiction, replete with drawing-room skulduggery and tawdry goings-on that show how little human beings have changed over the past 2,000-plus years. While I eagerly await the third installment in the promised trilogy I'll busy myself enjoying Harris's latest novel The Fear Index, a thriller set in the thick of the recent world financial crisis.

Ethan Casey's's next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published in fall 2013 and is available for pre-purchase. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.

Next, of course, comes the empty ritual of pretending that we must make sure something like this never happens again. How? By some forensic inquiry into the psychology of the shooter, Mr. Lanza... his comings, goings, email musings, Netflix rentals, chemical composition of his fingernail clippings?

I suspect that we indulge in such tiresome parsings of each killer's particulars because we want to avoid facing their much more widely damning societal, which is to say political, context. Five long months ago, just after James Holmes killed twelve people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, I wrote an article with the provocative title "The Colorado Killer Is Not a Muslim". On the Huffington Post version of my article, reader Robert Arredondo objected:

This is not a point to be made. Those with political agendas who commit acts to perpetuate their social, religious, political goals by organize[d] means are considered terrorist. A lone gunman overcome by madness or anger is not.

Arredondo's point is, strictly speaking, true enough. But we indulge ourselves and each other when we insist that incidents like Aurora and Newtown are not political. If such an incident doesn't have a political context -- a context, that is, that challenges us as a society to articulate and enforce our collective priorities -- then what does? For starters, we need to face the fact that we're all too eager to parse a perpetrator's psychology when he's a white guy, but when he's brown and/or Muslim that's all we allow him to be. But Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist and, because Gabrielle Giffords was an elected official, Jared Loughner's attempted killing of her had the effect, if perhaps not the intention, of terrorism. Furthermore, if Loughner, Holmes, Dylan Klebold thirteen years ago at Columbine High School, now Lanza, and others whose names escape our memory were troubled young men, so was the Pakistan-born U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up Times Square in May 2010.

What do troubled young white Americans here at home have to do with troubled young Muslims, whether here or overseas? Adam Lankford offers one thoughtful answer in a December 18 New York Times op-ed titled "What Drives Suicidal Mass Killers":

It is tempting to look back at recent history and wonder what's wrong with America -- our culture and our policies. But underneath the pain, the rage and the desire to die, rampage shooters like Mr. Lanza are remarkably similar to aberrant mass killers -- including suicide terrorists -- in other countries. The difference rests in how they are shaped by cultural forces and which destructive behaviors they seek to copy.

Another insight comes from the authoritative Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in his recent book Pakistan on the Brink:

One-third of Pakistanis today lack drinking water, another 77 million have unreliable food sources, and half the school-age children do not go to school. The literacy rate is 57 percent, the lowest in South Asia and not much better than the 52 percent that prevailed at the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Half the population are not even looking for jobs, since they know they won't be able to find them. The country needs at least a 9 percent annual growth rate to employ its under-twenties, who make up 60 percent of the population. The 37 percent of Pakistanis who are under the age of fifteen give Pakistan one of the world's largest youth bulges.

"The Newtown Massacre to me is largely about the failure of men in America," writes Kunstler,

and in particular the failure of men to raise up male children into men. ... What matters now is that an epochal undertow of events is dragging this enormous nation into an economic convulsion that will inevitably turn political. I don't think that our society can be redeemed in its current form. It has to pass through a tribulation that demands the reemergence of adult male humans who know how to be men in more than one dimension.

Children in Pakistan have in common with children in America in that both are God's children. In both countries, the urgent challenge is to provide young men with productive work to do and dignified, adult roles to play in their families and society. I specify young men in particular because it's usually young men, not women, who shoot people and blow things up. Thus Newtown is a lot like many villages in Pakistan. What the children and adult citizens of Newtown suffered on December 14 is what children and adults fear, and all too often suffer, every week in Pakistan at the hands of the Taliban and other extremists on one hand, and of the American operators of unmanned drone aircraft on the other.

So if, as I argue, mass killings in America are unavoidably political, what of it? The "meaningful" gun control legislation President Obama is urging, and on which public opinion seems to be insisting, would be a good start and would signal our seriousness. And there's no need to be timid or apologetic. Since, as Newtown all too brutally illustrated, none of us has any real physical security anyway, there's no reason not to push back hard against the gun culture and the gun lobby. Better late than never. The alternative is to allow our society to be ruled by bullies.

I've written about this before, never eagerly but willingly, because, as a non-Jewish, non-Muslim American, I don't appreciate the way my country's politics is distorted, and its public discussion muffled and wrapped in euphemism, whenever the matter at hand is Israel's behavior in the Palestinian territories. My previous expressed views are on record in a June 2010 article with the candid title "Israel and the Distortion of American Politics." After publishing a more recent article I lost a friend (I thought he was a friend) for making the obvious point that, far from being victims, Jewish Americans are an affluent, privileged, and influential community.

Whether those are good or bad things for a community to be depends on the uses such a community makes of its affluence, privilege, and influence. But part of the problem is that too many non-Jews in America say nothing rather than risk being branded, as I essentially was by my ex-friend, tantamount to a Holocaust denier.

All this is prelude to my real point: that both the situation in the Middle East and the quality of American public life will improve when American Muslims become more audible and visible. I do know, because they're friends of mine, that many of them are trying hard to be heard. At a dinner party attended by privileged white people recently in South Carolina, I was made to answer the myopic or tendentious question, "Why don't Muslims object when Muslims commit terrorist attack and atrocities?" The answer I gave was that they do; we just don't hear them. Less than two weeks later I was asked to speak at a public demonstration organized by Muslims in Orlando, Florida against the Taliban attack on Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old girl who had become an outspoken advocate for girls' education in Pakistan. In my remarks I got applause for saying that, if Malala can do what she has done, at real risk to her personal safety, such a rally is the least that we in America can do.

The point is not that we should be pleased with ourselves for holding a rally, but that that really is the very least that we can do. We need to do much more. Applause is gratifying, but it's the merest baby step toward the much more assertive activism that I believe is urgently called for. The Muslims who attended the Orlando rally, and others like them all around America, are affluent and privileged. What they're not is publicly influential, for two reasons. One is that, understandably though unfairly, they've been stigmatized and forced onto the defensive ever since 2001. But the other side of the same coin is that they've acquiesced in their own marginalization. In America, communities get attention and respect when they step forward and make noise, nonviolently to be sure but by all means assertively and politically. If you don't toot your own horn, you can't expect anyone else to toot it for you.

I've written before that the civil rights movement offers a model. Another model is the remarkable success that gay Americans have enjoyed in advancing their concerns and aspirations in recent years. The point is that such success doesn't just happen. Gay people have a dedicated day every July when they descend on Disney World en masse, all wearing red t-shirts. The statement they're making is: We're here among you, we have money and influence, and we respectfully require you to deal with it.

There's a lot of confusion and overlap, but the issues are essentially not religious but political. To my Muslim friends, I respectfully suggest that life will improve for Muslims in Palestine and Pakistan, and for all of us in America, the day that thousands of American Muslim families show up at Disney World all wearing green t-shirts.

ETHAN CASEY's next book, Home Free: A Real American Road Trip, will be published next year and is available for pre-purchase. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans. Join his email list here.

When I wrote about Aurora on the Huffington Post, I was taken to task for emphasizing a negative fact that mainstream America almost completely failed to acknowledge: that the killer was not a Muslim. "This is not a point to be made," wrote reader Robert Arredondo. "Those with political agendas who commit acts to perpetuate their social, religious, political goals by organized means are considered terrorist. A lone gunman overcome by madness or anger is not." When I directed readers' attention to an article by the Washington correspondent of the leading Pakistani daily Dawn, quoting a voice mail on the cell phone of a DC-area cabdriver named Rasheed as saying "Someone killed 12 people in a theatre in Aurora, Colorado. Please pray to God that the killer does not turn out to be a Muslim," reader Sam Baxter replied snidely: "Meanwhile, the rest of us were praying for the victims and their families. It is not all about you, believe it or not."

I insist that the point I was making is one to be made, because I insist on trying to face the political aspect of Aurora - and now of the mass killing in suburban Milwaukee. As long as American society continues refusing to address the issue of gun control in any serious way, and law-abiding, taxpaying, contributing U.S. citizens who are Muslim, or brown, or otherwise "foreign," feel compelled to apologize for who they are and live in fear because of an unfair stigma, every one of these incidents will be inherently political.

Politics in a divided society is never safe or comfortable, but it's necessary. In fact, the less safe and comfortable it is, the more necessary it is. Eugene McCarthy made this point in The Year of the People, his book about the tumultuous events of 1968 in which he played an honorable leading role: that sometimes it's necessary to emphasize not unity but division. The division I would emphasize is between those Americans who lean on platitudes and would sweep our society's native violence under the carpet yet again, and those who know that we can no longer afford platitudes.

Eugene McCarthy is an apt figure to cite in this context. Where is the Eugene McCarthy of this election year? The two presidential candidates, one of whom already holds the office that is supposed to be the very embodiment of American leadership, both have exposed themselves, post-Aurora, as brazenly craven to the gun lobby and other political bullies. Apparently real leadership will have to come from elsewhere. The problem is that those who, like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, like Salmaan Taseer in Pakistan, step up at dangerous moments to provide real political leadership, often end up getting shot.

If America is ever going to re-unify as a coherent national society, it must do so around a consensus on the right answer to this question: Do we want to be a society based on freedom and mutual respect, or one governed by brute force and kept in check by fear? Here's another, related question: Are there principles that are more fundamentally American than the right to bear arms? If we can't find or agree on some, then we're in real trouble.

So we come around to the specific incident that took place on Sunday morning at a Sikh gurdwara, or temple, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. It is being dealt with, ominously though I believe correctly, as "domestic terrorism." Among the first things the public learned about it is that the killer was a white male in his thirties. A difference between him and the killer in Aurora is that the Colorado killer is in his twenties. Neither is a Muslim. The Wisconsin victims are Sikhs, not Muslims - but did the killer, and do most Americans, know that Sikhs and South Asian Muslims are different (and even historically antagonistic) communities? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted a Sikh eyewitness as calling it a "hate crime." If he turns out to be right, then I venture that it was a hate crime not against Sikhs in particular, but against brown people in general, with an anti-Muslim subtext. If we fail to address it, aggressively and nationally, as such, it will be to both our shame and our loss.

Both of the recent mass killings hit close to home for me: my parents live in Colorado and I have friends in Aurora, and I grew up in the idyllic all-white town of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, 43 miles from Oak Creek. I'm as white as any other white person, and neither more nor less American than anyone. I cherish the Wisconsin that I grew up in. And, as an American, I'm prepared to fight for the America that I want to live in.

The movements of half a century ago for civil rights and against the Vietnam War - at once nonviolent and assertively political - should have taught us that such an America is worth fighting for.

ETHAN CASEY's next book, Home Free: An American Road Trip, will be published next year and is available for pre-purchase. He is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans Join his email list here.

Because he's not a Muslim, over the coming days excuses and caveats will be incorporated into our national "narrative" about the incident, etcetera, etcetera. We've seen this movie before. The President of the United States has already said something suitably solemn. No doubt he'll fly into Denver, as he flew into Tucson last year, and speak eloquently at a memorial service. But we need more and better than that - not only or primarily from the president, but from ourselves and each other.

Some readers surely will object to my pointing out what the alleged killer is not. But the fact that James Holmes is not a Muslim - indeed that, as a former San Diego neighbor put it, he "seemed to be a normal kid" - is all too relevant. Not that Muslims aren't normal; they're no less normal than you or me or James Holmes. What the Aurora rampage should bring home to normal Americans is that the clear and present danger to American society is not only among us, it is us. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine one of the makers of the show South Park (I forget which one) describes the Denver suburb of Littleton, site of the infamous Columbine massacre and not far from Aurora, as "painfully normal". I've been to both towns, and I concur.

After Jared Loughner killed six people and almost killed Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson on January 8, 2011, I wrote an article asking "Is America Any Different from Pakistan?" The article drew parallels between the Giffords shooting and the then-recent assassination of the liberal Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer. It also drew predictable rhetorical fire, such as this:

Yawn yet another typical leftie more than willing to jump on the bandwagon of blaming the right, America, and any other group he/she opposes for the actions of a mentally insane person. Jared Loughner appears to have been a psychotic, I suspect a schizophrenic.

I might be accused again now of politicizing a tragedy. So be it. The insistence that something is not political is itself a political gambit, in fact a bullying tactic. And, as a free American, I'm sick and tired of being bullied and told to live in fear.

If I'm sick and tired of it, I can only imagine how my Muslim friends must feel, after more than a decade of being made to feel less than American. This is very relevant at a time when prominent right-wing politicians are getting away with making McCarthyist insinuations about who gets to count as American and who doesn't. Jared Loughner was dismissed (as above) as a lone nut; no doubt James Holmes will be too. When a troubled young U.S. citizen named Faisal Shahzad tried to blow up Times Square, TV coverage ran provocative taglines like MADE IN PAKISTAN. (I felt compelled at the time to write an article titled "Some of My Best Friends Are Pakistanis".) It's not fair. And it's past time we acknowledged that troubled young men like Loughner and Holmes are made in America.

This particular incident may not be directly political, but it certainly is symptomatic. In terms of the news cycle, it will have its day, then America will, as we say, move on. Americans are good at moving on, the way Mr. Magoo used to move on through mayhem of his own making. Before we do, we might want to reflect on what the phenomenon of lines around the block for midnight screenings of a film like The Dark Knight Rises says about our society. Much was made in the pre-release hype of the film's 9/11-esque scenario. And then the real-life gunman who kills at least twelve and terrorizes an entire movie audience and a nation beyond turns out to be a normal American. Hmm.

ETHAN CASEY is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (2004), Overtaken By Events: A Pakistan Road Trip (2010), and Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti (2012). He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1992). Web: www.ethancasey.com or www.facebook.com/ethancaseyfans Join his email list here.

I think Roberts has handled it very deftly. He has avoided an immediate crisis [and] given a victory to celebrate to Obama, though he has almost handed the election to Romney and in the end given a huge leap forward towards advancing his conservative agenda.

Pakistanis can teach a ton of things to the Americans. But if it comes to the Judiciary, I must say Pakistan holds the most honest, and efficient, self reliant... judiciary system in east Asian states. [It is] the only single pure ray of light in this corrupt fogged environment.

If anything, the Supreme Court in Pakistan needs to learn to be "above politics," which is not something I'm sure it can do with Chaudhry still as the Chief Justice. I recently wrote on the two courts here.