Bittersweet Symphony
2004-05-22 at 7:08 p.m.
And I'm proud to be an American
...where at least I know I'm free. You know, I was big time geeky patriot before September 11th, but I felt that the whole concept was hijacked, so I stopped identifying myself as one. I think our country is the greatest country in the world, and we shouldn't be ashamed of it. We should be ashamed of the bad things evil men do in our name, and we should do our best to stop them and make things right. But we shouldn't ever forget that we live somewhere where at least we recognize our problems, and there will always be people working to fix them. There are problems, but there are so many great things. So many...Maybe I'm a little homesick (for sure, today I looked at the clouds and tried to imagine I was at home because they look the same) and maybe I'm tired of the hypocrisy that you inevitably run into when your culture clashes with one that is still struggling to get where you've already gotten. I read a speech by Hassan Nasrallah, and despite my family's attempts to water down the cold hard truth ("He didn't mean all Americans when he said "Americans,"), I guess it just really made me sick. It was from two years ago, deriding the moral collapse of American society. He said that our whole society is racist, which is laughable considering the very real class status of the maids who almost everyone has in their home, who only come from Sri Lanka and Africa. No Lebanese woman would ever condescend. And another thing is that in many ways, Lebanese culture is more overtly sexual and status-seeking than American. If the women are not religious (and all of them on TV are not, except the ones on Hezbollah's station), they only wear designer clothes and lots and lots of make-up. It's hard to decribe, except to say that it has a definite Euro-trash feel to it. It doesn't bother me, except to see that America is criticized for the exact same thing. I just want to talk to people about their philosophic inconsistencies. Nobody wants to do that of course. Not that I've tried very much, I realize the pointlessness. But it's a desperate, unfulfilled yearning I have.
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