“I used to think, ‘Life is great, but people suck,’ but now I’ve had to learn the opposite, ‘Life sucks, but people are great.’”
Neil Peart, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road
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I’m reminded of when I left Massachusetts at age 22, the only environment I had ever known, and hitchhiked north to Montreal and then westward, finally landing in San Francisco four months later. An insistent voice had told me that I needed to get away. But towards…what? I didn’t know.
Along my journey, I met some of the kindest, most generous and truly wonderful people I have ever met, who treated this lonely stranger so exceptionally. Or maybe they weren’t an exception.
some people anyways
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUtFXmS9FmA
I’ll Keep It With Mine Fairport Convention
I just watched “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage” (doco about Rush- highly recommended) and its really the first time I learnt of what Neil Peart went through with his wife and daughter.
Almost all of us experience personal loss at some stage throughout our lives – some more cruelly than others – but i guess in the end, most of us come out the other end more or less functional. Thats probably of little comfort to someone who is in the midst of experiencing that grief in its fullest force, but nevertheless….
Michael.
In case you haven’t heard. Michael Yon has said it’s time to get out of Afgan.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/01/25/the-breathtaking-hypocrisy-of-julian-assange-kremlin-pawn/
“Why so serious?”
As for Afghanistan, why continue to fight a war this administration did not plan to win? Perhaps the most striking thing about the State of the Union is that Obama heralded the “peace” and sacrifice” in Iraq. He constantly used the military to deflect from serious questions about how vain our sacrifice will turn out to be. Andrew Sullivan seems to have a serious reaction to all the Kool Aid he’s been drinking.
On Colbert last night, you would think Sullivan thought Obama was the second coming. The false facts were almost as amazing as Colbert’s inability to confront them.
Actually, I thought that the one sentence in Michael’s post above was one of the best that I’ve seen.
Is this apropos?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD1z42Zfz54
Today, where all of you live, there are funerals and there are babies being born.
I was once in a hospital and decided, for no reason, to visit the the maternity ward/nursery. I just stood there and watched. Man, what a happy, moving experience it was. Perspective on life.
I probably should do that again from time to time. For perspective on life.
I certainly will be doing it in about 3 months. But at that time I’ll only be focusing on one baby.
Haven’t you picked up your copy of Newsweek, Max and learned why The One’s critics are so stupid? Or why Newt is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person? When it didn’t raise my BP so much I’d listen and simply ask “what’s your proof?”
ARRESTED
DEVELOPMENT
But we can get back to this sad tale any old time. Dikehopper’s right; it’s good for the spirit to celebrate life.
What I learn from this blog is that people suck… That Islam creates the Lebanese civil war, the Syrian civil war, I could add the Bangladesh genocide. That “the holy land” is a misspelling, it’s “the holey land” because of bullet holes, knife holes, machete wounds and the craters explosions leave behind.
If a god ever came to the middle east he did so because he laughs to see the blood letting that idiots will inflict for eternity because of his messages.
Josh, there is a great deal of kindness and decency in the Middle East, too. That’s easier to see up close than it is from a distance. Never in my life have I had such warm and welcoming neighbors as when I lived in Lebanon. Most of my neighbors were (Sunni) Muslims, not Christians.
And Islam didn’t create the Lebanese civil war. That conflict was ignited by clashes between Maronite and secular Palestinian militias, and it was deliberately and cynically exacerbated by the secular Alawite regime next door in Damascus. The Israelis barged in to get rid of Arafat, and that part of the conflict had little or nothing to do with Islam either. Islam wasn’t much of a factor at all until the IRGC showed up in the Bekaa Valley and created Hezbollah.
I don’t buy that, the absolute inhumanity that each sect shows each other rooted in a long history of sectarian supremacist going back at least as far as Mohammad’s own extreme violence.
And the horror that is Alawite totalitarian oppression is rooted in the secure knowledge that Alawites lives are worth nothing at all under the rule of Sunnis.
Just as humane attitudes and the golden rule can create multiplying effects, an economy of decency, a history and philosophy of inhumane tribal oppression also has a multiplying effect and creates an economy of injustice, even an economy of atrocity.
Also the likability of Arabs is a required survival trait in a society where there are few if any checks on the abuse of power.
The more powerless the individual, the more dependent the good will of others, the more likable the individual must be in order to survive.
When people can be rude, when people can trust that a society is so just, that the individual is so powerful that they don’t have to be liked at all, then you have a healthy society.
If you live in a country where any official can have your family ruined and there is no recourse, you will be unbelievably sweet to officials.
If you live in a country where your parents can have you killed and there will no punishment, either social or legal you will be unbelievably sweet to your parents.
If you live in a country were strangers can represent clans that consider your clan, your sect, less than human and could easily fall into vendetta. Where murder between clans will be stopped by no one, you will be unbelievably sweet to strangers in order to prevent that situation. Your own people will demand that you are.
Sweetness is not a sign of a healthy society.
Josh: Also the likability of Arabs is a required survival trait in a society where there are few if any checks on the abuse of power. The more powerless the individual, the more dependent the good will of others, the more likable the individual must be in order to survive.
That’s an interesting point, one I hadn’t thought of before. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s worth thinking about.
I’m pretty sure it isn’t universally true, though. A lot of people in the former Soviet Union are sullen and cold while Albanians are extremely warm and likeable even though they no longer have to be for reasons described above.
If may simply be that Arabs are friendly and likeable because they decided as a culture that life is better that way. It may also be a lasting product of ancient Bedouin culture. I really don’t know.
I should add as a counterpoint, though, that Kuwait is a cold and unfriendly place. It may not be the only Arab country that is. I haven’t visited all of them.
The friendliest place I have ever been in the world is Tunisia. The friendliness of Tunisians is overwhelming and an amazing thing to experience.
I should also say something about the friendliness of Tunisians. Tunisian Arabs are friendly. Tunisian Tuaregs (indigenous Saharan nomads) can be extremely cold and intimidating. I admire the Tuaregs and don’t mean to insult them. I doubt they would be insulted, however, as they’re almost certainly like this on purpose.
They’re an interesting group of people. Women don’t veil themselves, but men do. That’s one of the reasons they can be intimidating. It makes them somewhat anonymous (and therefore more powerful), and since women and non-Tuareg men like me (and Arabs) can’t read their facial expressions, they have an advantage.
I admit I prefer when people are friendly.
But I don’t confuse friendliness with safety or modernity. A man could be friendly up to the point where he decides to kill you or your family or your entire people. Belief and society rather than nature place the limit on human behavior, and you can’t see either of those with the naked eye. Belief controls how a person interprets what they see, controls what they see or think they see – and that is what really determines on what humans will do.
You yourself wrote an article about a friendly man in Jerusalem who wanted to see all Israelis killed so badly that he would prefer that everyone he’s ever known be killed including his family, just to kill those “enemies”.. And despite the fact that he does business with those “enemies” and acts friendly to them every day.
Perhaps he seemed human, perhaps he seemed friendly, but his beliefs made him an unmitigated monster.
There have been times when I met apparently moderate Muslims on the internet and pushed them so I could distinguish actually human from the mere appearance.
For instance I pressed a Shiite from a rather moderate sect on whether Israelis have the right to defend themselves from, say attack by Palestinian terrorists. The result was an interestingly dishonest one:
1) he tried to give a false impression by answering only related questions but never the actual question
2) he said that the question insulted him and attempted to ban me from his blog
3) it became clear that he wanted to give an impression of moderate attitude but could not bring himself to say that Jews have a right to self-defense
4) he could criticize Sunnis without limit but could not bring himself to criticize Shiite leaders
As you found when you pressed that man in Jerusalem, you can not know how humane someone’s attitudes are unless you press them and they’re willing to reveal their attitudes.
But you can read between the lines. When I read, in a Lebanese newspaper, a man accused of heresy for writing a vaguely anti-war song defended on the grounds that he had killed many Jews and that his detractor (a government minister) had not, I learned quite a bit more than I’m happy knowing about the assumptions in Lebanese society.
The position of an outsider in some societies is like that of a mouse living in a human house. You might be taken as a pet and coddled, but that doesn’t mean that you and your kind won’t be exterminated.
Also it occurs to me that if the Tuaregs find it useful to be intimidating, that’s a sign that they’re not in an entirely civilized part of the world.
Just as, beautiful as it is, the fact that ancient cities in Yemen were built high on crags means that attacks on cities were common.