Driven by Curiosity…

All the comments from the previous blog, left me unsettled thinking for the last couple of days whether we really are a violent nation… at the beginning I thought that violence in other countries is much higher… or maybe it is not, violent stories are well hidden in Jordan and we don’t know about them?? visit Bashir hospital and you would know what I am talking about. I am not sure. I started looking through different articles and reports, and in couple of hours, I felt totally depressed! The good news though, I did not find anything specific on Jordan. So hamdulilah we are not reported as violent people.

Violence in the Middle East, like violence elsewhere in the world, is manifested in the hate, prejudice, and selfishness found in all human beings. Unfortunately our spirituality is defined by the same negative attitudes that define our relationships. The competitiveness we have injected into our peaceful religion contains the seeds of the violence destroying our social fabric today (our hello says peace be on you…) . Can it be changed? Gandhi said nothing in this world is impossible to achieve if we have the will to do so.

According to Amnesty International’s 2004 report, we have a high rate of violence, represented in so many forms, political violence, violence against women, Refugee and Migrants.. you name it… however, there is an effort to restore more human rights in the area, more activist groups are emerging and being accepted in different countries across the Arab world.

Now Nawal Sadawi seems to think there is a correlation between violence and sexual frustration; she gives two examples, the conservative American society, where violence is a serious issue. ( Bowling for columbine gives details about violence there… though devoid from this sexual theory) and gives another example the Scandinavian countries where people are not sexually frustrated and violence is very little. (At least against other people… I mean it is reported that the highest suicide rate is in there… I personally think it is because they don’t get enough sunlight!!!)

Speaking of sunlight, it is very sunny outside, so I am going to enjoy the beauty of nature… kite runner turns out to be a good book…I had to stop reading yesterday when the most important thing in the novel happens because I did not want to dream about it. Crescent is ok, the writer made a rather silly mistake… she goes tomorrow is the first day of Ramadan and since the moon is full today… I am going home walking… anyway

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I was talking to my sister yesterday. I asked her about her day, and she told me that she spent the day in one of the universities, supervising some event. She was telling me how much effort they tried to put in this event…. Then she said out the blue…
“Honestly, no matter how much you try, it goes for nothing! (3ala il fadi… )”

Then she tells us about two students, who got into an argument about who was first in line, and one word leads to the other. Unexpectedly, and in a split of a moment in a NINJA like manner, one of the innocent looking students takes off his belt very swiftly! And in a SUPER NINJA mode the other students retaliates with a hidden knife and they get into this tosheh! … Nothing dramatic happened, the other students were cheering from around them, few guys jumped to the rescue… then security came in and all the fun ended!

To me this was a hilarious story; it took me hours to get over the humor, I remembered all the touash I witnessed in school and through the stories narrated by one of my brothers, when he was young and ignorant! I thought about my sister thinking of inviting these two students to her office, to try and understand their psychology, and my mother’s concerned remark (balash, my love, mish na2isna they will hit you!!) I also thought that these very same people including me standing in line (zai il araneb) when we are anywhere but Jordan, and then fighting over who goes first when we are in Jordan…. Funny, No?

As always, we had a family discussion about this story (Thank God for Skype, I would be missing on a lot otherwise) and we came to the conclusion, that we are successful as individuals and a failure as a society, because we never belong to ourselves, we belong to our families and our tribes, so we cancel our individual conscience in favor of the collective conscience… do we really?

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