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Meet Me in the Middle (East)

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Has the World Gone Crazy?

In my final Arabic class my teacher said he is more convinced every day that the world has gone crazy. Il ‘alem mejnoun.

The world has grown smaller. The threats have grown bigger. The destruction that can be wreaked by a single person has multiplied exponentially. Have people have gone crazy? Are people forgetting how to care, how to trust and respect one another? He seems to think so.

My teacher is a charming and intelligent man, raised in a village south of Amman. He speaks three languages and has taught French and Arabic for 25 years. Just thinking about him conjures up a smile on my face. And he said all this in a resigned and baffled tone, a mixture of sad submission and frank acknowledgment of something he was tired of struggling against.

He was of course quickly countered by the energetic class of mostly Americans, who jumped to rally the optimistic view of the world. And some agreed with him. Someone said it really isn’t that bad, the world has been through the Black Death and several other terrible periods and it just goes in cycles. I think this is an interesting argument, and I am trying not to be depressed that it was the best answer we came up with on the spot. Mind you it was a brief discussion that digressed us quickly away from Arabic and so we were drawn back to focus on the subject at hand, but still. . .

So is the world crazier? I think back to when I was a kid (and this is one of those I’m going to sound old directions but it can’t be avoided). It seemed like the world was a different place. I don’t know about less crazy but definitely less paranoid and less afraid. We rode around in the back of trucks with no seatbelts, spent hours wandering off by ourselves, created elaborate games out of sticks, played dodgeball and performed daring acts like eating pop rocks with soda, and while it’s possible I had a no-so-average childhood on a dairy farm in upstate NY with no TV…I don’t feel like kids today have the same childhood bubble in which to revel in, carefree, discovering themselves and the world. Is the world, are people today, better, worse or different than in the past? (I also feel like every generation says this to some extent, so maybe this is just a reoccurring generational sensation.) Or maybe I have just seen more of the world, maybe this is the sensation of me growing up and taking that final step out of the bubble. Ma barrif. I don’t know.

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