An update

So ... the past few months, since I last blogged, have been rather challenging.  I have had this chest pain which refuses to go away, and what makes it really frustrating is that no one seems to know what's causing it!

While it's easy to dwell on the terrible things such an experience presents, I am finding that it has brought out many things -- good things if I may say -- that really make me happy!  I have friends and coworkers who are going way out of their way to be supportive -- with one friend practically putting her life on hold to fly from California to be with me.  My coworkers drive me back and forth to work, and even bought me a cot to lie down in when I'm not feeling well enough.  The heartfelt concern and support I've been getting is nothing far short of incredible!  I don't know what I did to deserve these wonderful people in my life, but whatever it is, I'm very glad to have them.  Just everything else does, this too shall pass!

The 4th of July

So, it’s the first of July (yes, that heading right above this article is correct). This is my 18th July in the United States, but my first as an American. Yes, it was a long fight to get here, and I must say it’s been worth every bit of it.

Despite my misgivings about this country’s foreign policy in some parts of the world, especially the Middle East, which is where I was born and raised, I have no doubt in my mind when it comes to the overall decency of the people of this country. Yes, there are the extremists, the racists, the yahoos and the jobos, but show me a country which doesn’t have its share of those.

Americans are among the highest (if not the highest) charity contributing people in the world. In my travels around this country, I’ve seen a general respect for human life, human dignity and the human spirit. There are many people who get up everyday to do the right thing. They have a set of ideals that govern their lives, and many are willing to stand up for those ideals.

America is not a country that does no wrong. America, to me, is a set of values and ideals, ones that govern our culture. They are the values of freedom, respect for others, and fair play – give everyone their fair chance, irrespective of who they are, what they believe in and where they come from. So long as the majority of us are committed to those ideals, this country will be “America”. As soon as we abandon those ideals to those of religious extremism or racism, whether in the name of security or so called patriotism, this country will lose all that made it what it is today – it will no longer be America.

The past few years have tarnished the reputation of this country around the world and planted grave doubts about its commitment to its core values. My faith in the American people and their belief in their core values, however, was not misplaced. Americans overwhelmingly chose to reverse the dark course that their country took. I hope that the commitment to the core values continues, and on my part, I pledge here for all to hear: “my country right or wrong. If it’s right, I will support it, if it’s wrong, I’ll do what I can to correct it.”

I've been to many places ... too bad none of them is real

The last few weeks have been rather challenging. In early may, a terrible and unceasing wave of chest pain came over me. I underwent several MRI's and other imaging, all of which revieled nothing!

In trying to manage the situation, I was put on pain killers (a strong dose of it). I've never been on pain killers this much before (sure I've taken the odd one or two when needed and prescribed, but never this many pills at a time). I had to resort to taking as much as four tablets at once, and that put me in a whole different world! This world was pleasant; but it was not real. Besides the fact that my pain was hidden away (pain killers never really kill the pain, they just mask it), I felt as though my mind was wandering in many places -- those of calm and anger, those of peace and anxiety and those of happiness and sadness. in addition to being masked from my pain, I was also masked from reality. My feelings were vivid, my imagination was ritch and my emotions were all over the place, but my whole reality was ... not real as it were! That's what drugs do to you!

It is nearly the end of June, and my chest seems to be calming down and my pain is on its way out. The world I leave behind, the world of pain killers is somewhat different from the world I entered into. There were many things I was looking forward to this summer, including a promising relationship, but as the world of pain killers is behind me, so is this relationship -- quite honestly, I'm not sure why! Pain is a tough beast to battle. For those of you who have never had to fight it, I hope you never do; and for those of you that have had their battles with it, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

Now that I am back into reality, it is up to me to make the best of it, and that I will.

I have put off many things this summer, and I don't know how much of them I can get back, but I do know that I am still going to take the Foreign Service Officer test, the one scheduled in June and had to be rescheduled to sometime in October. I have a life ahead of me, and no matter what reality throws at me, I'm still going to catch it and play it back -- there is no other choice; for a traveler can never travel if he stops.

Onward and forward.

fragen sie doch

It's amazing how we can spare ourselves making the most foolish of mistakes simply by asking! This was made abundantly clear to me on one of my recent oversees journeys.

On November 8, 2007, I was on a German Lufthansa flight from Frankfort Germany to Denver Colorado. As I was making my way through the aisle to find my seat all the way towards the back of the airplane (I walked so much I thought I was already in Denver), a flight attendant was apparently trying to gesture to me wanting to know how she could help. Naturally, I failed to see her gestures, since obviously my reason for her thinking that I wanted her help was the very fact that I couldn't see! It seems as though one of her bemused looks targeted her purser, and it seemed as though she was trying to mouth some words off to him presumably asking him what she should do! He looked at her and exclaimed in a normal, firm and professional tone of voice "fragen sie doch!", which simply means "ask!".

After getting over her shyness and being utterly surprised at me being able to converse with her in German, I safely got to my seat, and the purser himself, a Mr. Oblouvskey, came and introduced himself and asked "what can we do to be of help to you on this flight?" -- a simple yet very powerful question! I explained to him that I did not foresee any need for help during the flight, and that I will be sure to let them know if there was any exception to that on a case by case basis! Needless to say, the flight was one of my most pleasant ones! The statement that stuck with me ever since is "fragen sie doch" -- ask!

Blogging again -- maybe!

So ... here I am, blogging again. Why you say? Well, lots has changed, and I guess I feel I need to let something -- anything out!

So my lawsuit is over -- yes it is; and ... I won! If you're curious, go to http://www.uscitizenatlast.com/

So what's next for the traveler! Well, I must say I am enjoying the feeling of being "in between" journeys as it were. I usually don't like idle time, but now I seem to be enjoying it, and that's OK!

At the present moment, I'm working as a state employee for the Department of Services for the Blind in Washington State. I love the place, the people, but I just can't stand the weather! It's cloudy, rainy and overcast almost all the time! I have a difficult time adjusting to winter in June -- last year, proper summer did not begin until well after the forth of July!

So will the traveler be traveling again you ask? The answer is ... well, he wouldn't be a traveler if he didn't travel! I have applied for the State Department, and will be sitting down for the Foreign Service Officer Test on June 6 at 1:30 PM. The short end of it is that if I am hired, I'll simply be a US diplomat; one who gets paid to travel!

Let's see how all that ends up being -- as the Germans say, "Kommt Zeit, kommt Rat", or "in time comes certainty".

This is not it of course -- my life can never be summed up in a paragraph or two, but this is just a "snapshot" if you like. Lots more is happening and is likely to happen, but I really don't know how often I'll be blogging -- so feel free to use an old fashion way of communication -- yes, that's it, personal communication. Call, email, text; just let me know you're there and you care.

The trial of Homaidan Al Turki, a travesty of justice!

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers returned this week end from Saudi Arabia, where he assured the Saudis that Homaidan Al Turki, who was accused and convicted of holding an Indonesian nanny as a captive and sexually assaulting her, had a fair trial.

Having done business in Saudi Arabia, I am repulsed by the injustice and oppression which prevails in that country, and I was ready to convict Al Turki if it was proven that he indeed wronged that woman. The allegations against Mr. Al Turki, unfortunately, are common place amongst our best allies and the business partners of our raining Bush dynasty.

Let us remember, however, that it is Homaidan Al Turki that is on trial here and not Saudi Arabia. In the rules of evidence of our legal system, prior acts of a person, in many cases, cannot be admitted against him to prove a crime, let alone the acts of people with whom he had no acquaintance even if they were his compatriots. As someone who watched the trial and followed this case very closely, I can’t help but wonder if Al Turki really got his day in court, or if he simply was convicted based on fear, xenophobia and the terrible deeds of many of his compatriots.

Sitting in the court room, I couldn’t help but wonder why A manikin dressed in traditional Saudi attire stood there for the entire trial. I was further astonished when 9-11 was mentioned several times, though indirectly, despite its highly prejudicial value. We also learned that two FBI agents and a translator were sent to Indonesia at tax payer’s expense to take pictures of the victim’s family. Most blatant however were the FBI’s aggressive acts of harassment and coercion of members of Al Turki’s community, myself included. Agents would visit people in their home and interview them for hours, twisting events, taking advantage of their authority and capitalizing on the fears of people who came from authoritarian countries. Those who had the sense to ask for an attorney were further intimidated by being told that they shouldn’t need an attorney if they didn’t do anything wrong, the implication being, of course, that having an attorney would make them guilty.

So, are the Saudis justified in questioning the fairness of the trial? Considering the above, as well as the fact that the alleged victim repeatedly denied any sexual assault despite being questioned 11 times by FBI agents and officials from her country’s embassy, only changing her statement a day before she got her immigration papers, one can understand why some people may be skeptical. As if that was not enough, Al Turki’s attorneys found twelve blatant errors during the trial which together stood in the way of Al Turki’s fair judgment – and the manikin was not one of them.

During the sentencing, Al Turki, who had no prior acts of violence and who was out on bail for over a year during his trial, was disallowed the opportunity to wear street clothes, an opportunity given to people convicted of more heinous crimes, and was forced to sit in the court room restrained in handcuffs, despite his attorney’s plea to the judge. In a highly charged political climate, and when our legal system stresses the appearance as well as the actuality of fairness in a trial, why were these things allowed to happen?

Why soccer will never be a popular sport in America

I was watching a recorded episode last week of Dateline NBC, and they had a short commentary about why soccer isn’t so popular in the US.  The guy was saying “well, the game needs a make-over in the US.  Maybe we need to have good guys play against bad guys, and pictures of pretty girls you’d later see in Play Boy magazine”.  This suddenly made a light bulb go off in my head which answered my own similar question about why soccer would never ever become popular in this country.  You see, soccer (properly known as football in the real world), from third division local clubs to national and international championships is all about politics.  It’s all about bad guys against good guys.  It’s all about right against wrong.  It’s all about the underdog facing the big guys.  The only problem is that in order to participate in the game and have your heart in it, you have to know a bit about politics (you know, who does what around the world and why they’re right or why they’re wrong).

I can still clearly remember the world cup in Mexico back in 1986 when Argentina beat England 1-0.  It was Argentina’s get back against their terrible military defeat in the Falklands four years earlier.  Thinking about it now and remembering the world’s reaction at the time, I think it would have been less disgraceful for the English to have lost the war rather than having lost the match.

I listened to this year’s matches on BBC 5 Live, and being mostly surrounded by people who are clueless about the game, I took refuge in the talk shows in England to vent, shout and put in my $19.95’s worth.  Having little faith in their own team (rightfully so), many people were calling in giving their support to the Germans instead who were among the favorites to win.  The discussion sometimes didn’t center around how terrible the home team was, but how terribly strange it is that people were calling in supporting the German team!  How terrible!  Of course no one can forget the 1936 world cup in Berlin and how Hitler used them – no one who knew that is – but you’d remember if you’re English (what! How did this make it into the Detroit Free press!  Must have been someone like me who came here from the old world)!!  

Americans have no sense of the world around them.  You can drive for thousands of miles without crossing a border, and hence people here have little contact with other cultures.  Watching a football game requires a sense of worldliness, a sense that you are part of a bigger world, that you are a subset of a bigger set.  Simply put, Americans do not think that way.  The world is its own big entity, and the United States, to most Americans, is a separate entity all together.

A knock out punchline

I must make a confession here, and that is that I’m always captivated by a quick witted argument, let alone the person who makes it.  Irrespective of whether I agree with the person and/or the argument or not, the way in which an argument is put or a point is made goes a long way towards it’s strength and hence its acceptance.

Once upon a long ago, , before WWF, Football, boxing and other knock out sports came along, people used to debate each other in a sports-like fashion.  If you had a decent command of the language and the slightest bit of interest and knowledge of the topic at hand, you would have your adrenaline levels soaring as you follow the quiet statements which accelerate into passionate exchanges, which then culminate into full knock out punches, some of which could prove to be quite deadly to the debater’s career.

Though the theatrics are sometimes long remembered, much of what’s actually said is quickly forgotten, unless it’s so remarkable that it outlives the emotion which caused it to be said in the first place.  This is exactly the case for this statement made by Mr. George Galloway, the Respect MP for  Bethnal Green and Bow, in the context of the debate in the British Parliament on the Anglo-American extradition treaty (click here to read the full text of Mr. Galloway’s statements, and click here to view the full text of the parliamentary discussion).  

“All we want is a special relationship that does not resemble that between Miss Lewinsky and a former United States President: unequal, disreputable and with the junior partner always on their knees. That is not the kind of special relationship that we want, but as the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) powerfully made clear, it is exactly the kind of special relationship that most people in Britain think that we have with the United States of America, whether that is true or not”.

Now whether you agree with this argument or not, you have to admit it’s brilliant!  When I called and mentioned it to him on his talk show, his response was “I hope it wasn’t too much knuckles down for you”.  Anyway, if you’d like to hear more of that sort of talk, you can tune into Mr. Galloways weekly talk show On Sports Talk in Scotland.  The show is on Saturday and Sunday from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM Mountain Time.  Just go to the stations’s web site and click on the “listen live” link.  You will need to download the latest version of the Winamp player to be able to listen to the shoutcast stream.

Reflections on being an immigrent

“ملّيت أنا ملّيت من الغربة, وتعبت من الترحال ... وقاسيت حياة صعبة وقضيت ليالي طوال”.

These are words from a song called “mallait” sung by Warda Aldjazairia.  I’ve been looking for this song since 1992 when I first heard it on an Arabic radio station on Shortwave shortly after I migrated to the United States.  I haven’t heard it ever since, and I managed to find it yesterday by pure coincidence.

It was a beautiful song when I first heard it, but now it’s much more than that – it’s a reflection of so many of my sentiments and those of numerous others in my shoes.  I remember playing it early in the morning yesterday and nearly crying.  It was so easy to listen to in 1992 back when life was simple and when my knowledge of the world around me was quite limited.  Now I can only marvel about the complexity of the song and its lyrics.  The music, however, is still as beautiful now as it was then – perhaps even more.  Click here to download and listen to the song.

“I’m so fed up of being away from home, and I’m so weary of my numerous travels.  I have lived a tough life, and suffered so many sleepless nights”.

The lines above struck a chord with me, but I’d like to believe that with wisdom, faith, endurance and toughness I’ve been able to get over them.  It’s the next few lines that hit me like a ton of bricks.  They have always been true, still are, and I have a feeling that they’ll always be:

“من غير حبايبنا, أيه يسوى تغريبنا, وأن كان معانا المال ... دحنا في غربتنا, لو لحظة تعبتنا, تبان همومنا جبال".

Translated, they read:  “What’s being away from our loved ones worth, even if we have so much money, for if one little setback faces us, it always seems like mountains”.

Whether you like it or not, being extracted from your home, your childhood, your family and your loved ones places a huge burden upon your shoulders.  You will always carry the burden, and though your body might get used to it, you only need to add a straw to be reminded of its heavy weight.

The song goes on to say:

"الحلم خدنا معاه, وسافرنا ورا دنياه, وصحينا ولقيناه, حلم وسراب وخيال".

Translated: “the dream seduced us and took us with it, and we traveled and ran after it, and when we woke up, we realized it was an illusion, a mirage, a mere fantasy”.

I wondered about that for a long time.  When I came to America, I had a lot of dreams.  I dreamed of glory, money, status, happiness, and a life full of excitement.  While I’m proud of all that I’ve achieved, I often wonder if it’s worth the price I’m paying?  The fact of the matter is, I miss my family, I miss our neighbors, I miss my childhood friends, and I want to be with them so desperately.  The passion of such longing lights an ever lasting fire in my heart, and I have yet to learn how to extinguish it.

Though we are not from the same country, the singer and I come from the same part of the world and share a similar culture.  Despite the economic, political or social problems which plague this part of the world, the concept of community and roots is very strong.  Your roots are your family, your parents, your neighbors who cared for you just as your parents did, and your childhood which bonded you to them and to so many others.  Our countries were small, and you therefore scarcely moved, thus giving you the opportunity to experience the true meaning of human bonding.  When you’re extracted all of a sudden, whether fleeing a hated condition or merely chasing a dream, you experience the pain of extraction first hand.  You experience an almost lethal type of loneliness, and you experience certain feelings hardly familiar to the average human being.  You make friends, but you wonder, as our singer does in the next few lines:

“مالناش هنا أحباب, ... مين يعشق الأغراب, ... ألا ألِّ له أسباب, مهما حلف أو قال".

Translated: “we have no one to love us here, for no one loves a stranger, except those who have their own reasons, no matter what they say and by whom they swear”.

This brought tears to my eyes.  I don’t know if it is true, but I’m terrified it may be!  I’d like to think that my relationships with people which I have developed over the years have been based on a mutual feeling of our common humanity and thus on love and respect for one another, but is that really true?  I’ve developed strong relationships with people for the sake of doing business, so business was the common interest.  Some of these relationships outlived the purpose for which they were formed.  Some bonds were formed because of attraction to a member of the opposite sex, and these are usually over when the attraction is over, assuming a life long bond wasn’t created, or one that was created later became broken.  

I can’t help but ask myself, What is it then, and how does it work!  Are you, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, are you just a stranger, a drifter, one who doesn’t belong?  Can relationships formed with people who do not know the meaning of bonding as you do sustain difficult times?  Isn’t this just part of growing up, regardless whether you left your homeland or not?

Perhaps the question is not so simple, especially when you start to look at relationships amongst people of the host culture in the context of the culture itself.  You cannot judge your relationships in that culture with your own standards, you have to judge it with theirs.  If that’s how they treat each other, and if they’re not treating you any differently, then they’re not treating you as a stranger!  While this enables me to put the relationship in context, and while it gives me great comfort, since it affirms my feeling of taking part in fair and equitable relationships where everyone is doing their best as they understand it to be, it still nevertheless doesn’t dispel my feelings of estrangement.  I cannot help but feel that these are cold and unrewarding relationships.  This is how it feels to me, but ironically enough, this is not what it is.  The problem is that I’m trying to play the game with my own rules, and when I fail to win because I couldn’t quite understand the new rules, I feel sad and broken especially since I was a master of the game when I played it with the rules I knew.

The last segment of the song says:

"آن الأوان يا زمان, نرجع على الأوطان, ناخدها بالأحضان, دَالبعد عنها ضناء".

Translated: “Now the time has come to go back to the homeland, hug it and take it in our arms, for being away from it is like an unquenched thirst”.

Those lines used to invoke strong emotions when I first heard the song 14 years ago, but now they bring tears.  The painful conclusion I had to drive into the inner dungeons of my conscience was that the homeland disappears off the map the minute you leave it.  I know that this is very difficult to understand to those who have never left their homeland or to those who left but never attempted to return, but I assure you it is the truth, the painful truth and nothing but the truth.

The fact is that the world never ever stops, no matter where we are and what we do.  While wrapped up in our own affairs, we forget that the world doesn’t stop for others just the same.  Your family, childhood friends, the neighbors, the people you bonded with all went their own way.  The neighbors you knew moved away, grew old or died.  The little ones you left crawling grew to become adults, and the adults you left became old.  Each and everyone gained a different understanding of life through their own, often dissimilar, experiences, and without sufficient communication as there is when distances are not so vast, you grow apart without even being conscious of it.

When you leave, you leave with a certain image of the homeland which stays frozen in your mind through out the years of your absence.  As you start to experience the pain of being away, this image becomes idealized, such that you only retain the wonderful things you used to love, and forget the things which drove you away.  Similarly, those whom you leave remember you the way you were when you left, and your image is frozen in their minds just the same.  When you go back, you’re looking forward to finding the home you’ve been missing throughout your years of absence.  When your people see you, they remember the person who left them so many years ago.  The disappointment is sometimes mutual when you do not find the homeland you left, and when those who were waiting for you see a different person than the one they were desperately missing.  Compounded by the overwhelming realization that home is not the ideal place you dreamed it up to be, the experience of going back may prove to be quite difficult.

For anyone who leaves home for an extended amount of time, it is difficult to define home anymore.  For an immigrant, it is even more difficult, since they have to struggle to reach that definition.  Whether people end up staying in their newly adopted country as I’ve done and making it home, or whether they go back as I tried to do, the strong emotions and sentiments expressed in this song will always be there, keeping a supply of tears just below the surface, waiting to burst whenever an event, a word, a poem or a song strikes a chord and touches that sensitive nerve which you often forgot existed.

Smile! a beautiful poem!

When was the last time a verse of poetry shook your very existence and caused your heart to miss a beat?  For me, it was just a few weeks ago at the end of a wonderful evening which I spent with some friends entertaining a guest (who later became a friend) from out of town.  After a wonderful dinner, some Hookah and lots of hilariously funny jokes, I got in the car with my coterie to be dropped off home.  As my friend was getting ready to start the engine, I heard him mutter a poem under his breath which I instantly recognized.  I studied it whilst in 5th grade, and don’t believe I heard it recited ever since.  The poem is simply called “smile”, and it was written by the migrant Lebanese poet Iliya Abu Madi.  The words were so beautiful I nearly cried, and found myself struggling to pull the verses from the deepest bottoms of my memory.  After I got home, I kept remembering the verses over and over again, and a few days later, I decided to search for it on the Internet.  Thanks to Google, I was able to find it, and when I read the whole poem, I came to see the beauty, the optimism and the majesty of it.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a wave of migration took place from the Arab World to the United States and other countries in North, Central and South America.  This wave included a number of writers and poets who were so influential that they had a significant impact on Arabic literature, such that they later became masters of their own genre, the Genre known as “Adab Almahjar”, or the literature of the expatriates.  This genre, unlike its traditional counterparts, was simple but powerful, and incorporated elements of Western literature, dressing it in beautiful Arabic attire.  It spoke of love and longing, for the homeland, for the beautiful woman, the queen of the heart, for the loved ones far away and for happiness.  Such poets and writers included such renowned names as  Gibran Khalil Gibran, and of course the wonderful Iliya Abu Madi.

But back to the poem.  It takes place in the form of a dialogue between two friends, a pessimist and an optimist.  The pessimist was talking about all sorts of terrible things around him, things which are part and parcel of the life of an immigrant from the Middle East at that time, and the optimist was trying to convince him to smile!

Here is a vocal recitation of the poem in its native Arabic given by yours truly.  My apologies for those of you who speak Arabic for the mistakes I’m sure I made, and to those of you who do not, for failing to convey the full beauty of this poem in my attempt to translate it below.  Nevertheless, the poem, translated, goes like this:

He said “the sky is gloomy and full of sadness”,
I said “so smile, isn’t the sadness in the sky enough”?

He said “the days of youth are long gone”,
I said “So smile, do you think your sorrow will bring back those long gone days”?

He said “and she who brought heaven into my life with her love, has turned it with her love into a raging hell-fire.

She betrayed our vows after I gave her my heart, so how can I even bear to smile”!

I said “so smile and  sing, for if you had married her, you would have spent your whole life in pain and sorrow”.

He said “and business now a days is in such a struggle, just like the desert traveler who is almost being slain by thirst.

Or like a beautiful sick girl who is in need of so much blood, and yet each time she breathes she  exhales blood”.

I said “smile, for you’re not the cause of its sickness and its recovery, but if you smile, just maybe.

For its not your fault – it’s someone else’s, but yet you live in so much anxiety as if you are the guilty one”.

He said “and my adversaries’ voices have become so loud around me, how can I be please with my adversaries so close here in my safe refuge?”

I said “smile, for they wouldn’t have come after you for what you said if you weren’t higher and greater than they are.”

He said “and the signs of the holidays are slowly exposing themselves to me, with new clothes, with toys!

And I, as you know, have binding commitments of gifts for my loved ones, but my palm possesses not a Dirham (Dollar).”

I said “smile and think of how lucky you are to be alive, and how lucky you are to have those loved ones”.

He said “and the long nights have fed me so much bitterness,”
I said “smile, even if you had to scoff so much bitterness.

For if someone sees you hymning, they may put aside their sadness and chant with you.

I don’t see you earning a dirham (Dollar) with your misery, neither do I see you losing riches with a smile.

Oh my friend, there is no harm if your lips crack and your face chuckles.

So smile, for the meteor and the night both smile even when they have to face each other – and that’s why we love the sight of the stars!”

He said “oh, but cheerfulness can never bring happiness to someone who comes to this world and goes unwillingly.”

I said “oh but smile, as long as there is but a foot between you and death, smile, How come I don’t see you smiling yet!”

    

Fighting injustice

A free man should never allow others, no matter what and who they are, to rob him of his rights, his dignity and his self value.  The Egyptians have a saying I like, and it goes like this:  “They asked the pharaoh why he became such a tyrant, and he said “because no one stopped me””.  Our tolerance of injustice signifies our acquiescence of it, and I dare even go as far as argue that it may make us in accomplice in it.  To quote Edmund Burke. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.".

One of the biggest, most powerful and harshest perpetrators of injustice towards individuals are governments.  By the nature of their power, they can intimidate a person.  By the nature of their reach, they can establish fear in the hearts of so many.  To quote Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, Part 2, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.".

All governments by nature are corrupt, whether democratically elected or installed through other means.  When left unchecked, they grow to become regimes of tyranny, taking full advantage of the power vested in them by the people they govern.  Dictatorships repress their people openly by robbing them of their resources and taking away their rights, while democracies are more subtle about it, using instead fear, business, manipulation, security, social differences, the economy, just to name a few.  Regardless of the means, governments and the people who run them are bound to become corrupt.  To quote Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg  Acton, "Power tends to corrupt,  and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad men...  There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.".

What sets a democracy a part from a dictatorship, however, is the fact that a democratic government relies on a system of checks and balances to prevent abuse of power.  As long as the citizenry exercises its right in enforcing such a system, the government will remain in check.  If the citizenry chooses to ignore transgressions committed by their government, the government is bound to continue to push the envelope as far as it can, and before you know it, the envelope will be larger than you ever thought it would be.  As Frank I. Cobb said describing the authority of the American constitution, "It is not the powers that they conferred upon the government, but the powers that they prohibited to the government which makes the Constitution a charter of liberty.".

A perfect example of this are the recent transgressions perpetrated by the US government against civil liberties and basic human rights in the name of security.  Innocent unsuspecting people are being unfairly arrested, interrogated, questioned, investigated, their privacy being invaded and their basic rights denied left and right for no reason; all in the name of national security.  We have learned recently that the government has been spying on phone calls without proper legal authorization.  The government shot back with a lie that it was only listening to certain suspect phone calls for the supreme goal of protecting national security.  While this could have been thrown out of a court of law by a magistrate who may have just recently graduated from law school, it seemed as if the American people and their representatives in congress bought it.  We then learn that this wasn’t the case, and that the government was actually compiling massive databases of information about calls between people without regard to their activities, their affiliations or even their national origin.

Of course the above is but a climax in the administration’s transgression against liberty.  Ever since the new climate of post 9-11 set in, the government carried out campaigns of arrests and interrogations against Arabs and Muslims who were temporarily living in its borders.  Most people saw it as a necessary act to protect themselves and were willing to tolerate it – after all, these were foreigners, and it could be argued that the government was rightly justified in maintaining its sovereignty.  Once comfortable, the government then started changing the laws to allow the indefinite detention of people it (and it alone) deemed a security threat, including those who permanently reside in the US (but who are not yet citizens), without even so much as a defined procedure or a sound legal argument.  Once again, people were willing to overlook this, since, an argument, unconstitutional, preposterous and illegal as it may have been, was made that these were not necessarily entitled to the rights enjoyed by American citizens.

Once these practices set in with very little opposition from the American electorate, we learned that indefinite detentions and the suspension of all legal processes can be administered even to US citizens, something inconceivable to little children brought up in this country.  Once again, however, people were only too happy to overlook this, since, well, those who were arrested were Muslims and had funny names, and hence they could arguably be connected to the perceived enemy in some way.  With the xenophobia and fear mongering that was filling up the media, people wouldn’t have a problem seeing you lynched in the name of national security if you are Muslim.  

Once again, the government found it could do it, and the next logical step of spying on everybody is now being turned into a reality.  We all submitted to injustice, we all accepted it, we did nothing about it either by tolerating it when committed against us or turning a blind eye when it was done to our neighbors.  All we could do now is to complain about the injustice that’s being done.  As Frederick Douglas so eloquently put it, "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.".

Everyone has his/her reasons for not doing what’s right.  For the Americans, it was national security.  For the oppressed in a dictatorship, it’s fear of being harmed by their tyrannical government.  For the poor employee oppressed by his boss, it’s his/her fear of losing their job.  If you think about it, by submitting to injustice out of fear, you will continue to live with both.  To quote the eloquent Benjamin Franklin, "Those who would sacrifice liberty for safety will have neither liberty nor safety.".

In a democracy, action translates into insuring that the system of checks and balances is implemented.  If a transgression occurs, it needs to be dealt with through the court system, the media and the ballot box.  Where a government cares about its continued rule (and believe me, they all do), and where that continuity is directly contingent upon its good reputation and adherence to a fair constitution and just laws, courts, the media and the ballot box are incredibly powerful weapons.

The incident which happened to me at Dubai airport, though long and treacherous, gave me a lot of confidence and courage to continue to say no to injustice.  By speaking up, appreciating my worth as a human being, knowing my rights and striving for them, I will live happily, content in the knowledge that I am doing my part to struggle against injustice.  If we all could find in ourselves the courage to do that, will there ever be such a thing as injustice?

Tribute to 2005

On this last day of 2005, allow me to wish everyone a wonderful and a happy new year.  I hope that the holidays, no matter what race and faith you happen to belong to, have been kind to you, and that the new year brings success and prosperity your way.  I also want to ask you to join me in a moment of thoughts and prayers of peace for the world around us.  Looking at the terrible natural and man made disastures, it’s easy to lose hope and think that things are heading for the worst, but we can never abandon hope, hope which tells us that there is always something good that tomorrow is bringing, and that if we are patient, we will see and realize it.  It is truly hope that gives meaning to life.

To all my wonderful friends, my inspiration in this world, the people who were the pillers that kept me on my feet, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Wonderful memories of a remarkable man

Almost three years ago, I took part in a workshop designed to acquaint the press with the needs of people with disabilities.  The workshop was organized by the press club in Dubai, and was fairly well attended, mainly by service providers, advocates as well as various press personalities in the country.

Everything went as expected – the passing of information, the complaints, the protests, the sort of stuff you’d hear in a workshop of that kind in that part of the world, until a woman got up to speak.  She identified herself as Amal Alnuaimi.  No sooner did she speak her first sentence, she broke down and literally started crying.  “I look at you”, she said looking at me, “and I see my brother.  You are so similar, I do hope you will one day get to meet”.

I spoke to her after the workshop and we exchanged business cards, and found out that she worked in the same building I worked in.  We remained in touch, and I took the first opportunity to go to Bahrain to meet her brother, the one she was so proud of and spoke highly of.  I simply wanted to see what kind of a person he was, and I must say her description of him did not do him justice, for I doubt she, even being a journalist, would have been able to come up with the right words.

Khalid, the gentleman in question, is the son of AbdulRahman Alnuaimi, a long time political dissident who was expelled from his country almost thirty five years ago.  Consequently, Khalid was born and raised in exile, mostly in Syria.  He started losing his vision as he was growing up, and by the third year in college, he was, for all intents and purposes, totally blind.  He finished his studies in computer science in exile in Syria, and did a bit of traveling before returning, along with his family, to his native Bahrain, after a general amnesty was granted to most political exiles earlier this decade.

With his determination and his dry sense of humor, Khalid managed to break down a lot of barriers, ones I couldn’t dream of doing myself.  He graduated from an Arab university, lived all but six months of his life in the Arab world, and found work in the Arab world in his own major of computer science.  At the time when blind people are struggling to prove that they can get out of bed, he is holding a job in a reputed institution in his native country, constantly proving himself as a valuable contributing employee to his team and his country.  He does it with stride, always wanting to do more and achieve more, demanding more of himself and wanting to give more to the world around him.

His wife, a native Syrian, is no less remarkable.  The minute you see her your realize that she is not the subservient wife you’d find in that part of the world.  She has an outgoing personality,, friendly but tough, loving and supportive of her husband, not overbearing as women in that part of the world – indeed all over the world could be.  She doesn’t take care of him, she is his partner,, and they both take care of one another.  They are a team, working to make a happy family and raise their children, helping each other face the tough requirements that living in their part of the world necessitates.

Khalid continues to work to improve the lot of his blind compatriots.  He is active in the friendship association for the blind, helping all he can to raise the moral of his friends and counterparts, showing them the possibilities they otherwise couldn’t see.  In his struggle, many find consolation and encouragement, and through him many see a living example of what they can become.  Of the memories I had from that part of the world during my two years of living there, none are so memorable as the evening I spent with him, his child and his wonderful wife.  Of the people I met , none inspired me as much as he did.  I’m ever so proud to call such a man a friend, and am most thankful to that moment in which his sister, a wonderful woman herself, so fit to introduce us.  It is indeed a blessing, one the likes of which are quite rare, at least in my own life.

"me first", is it as selfish as it sounds?

     Well it’s been quite a while since I’ve written here, mainly because … well, what kept me from writing is what should have caused me to write in the first place.  I’ve done a bit of traveling in the past few months since my last post here, but I guess either the trips were boring or I just didn’t have the patience to write whatever I had on my mind.  Come to think of it, I think it was more the latter than the former.

Perhaps what overshadowed everything however was my health.  I’ve been feeling tired and short on energy almost all year long, and I brushed it off, as I always did, blaming it on a hectic schedule, hard work, or just plane laziness.  I’m the type of person who doesn’t like to be distracted by anything, including such things as feeling tired, sleeping, taking meals and other such mundane tasks.  This is the way I’ve always been, and this has served me well through out the years.  This is also why, I believe, I should cease and desist right now!

In the Islamic tradition, and in a Hadeeth (saying) attributed to the prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him, he states that “your body also has a right”.  In other words, you have to comply with the demands of your body, and it is compulsory for you to do so just as it is compulsory for you to follow every other obligation placed on you by the articles of the religion and the requirements of your society, such as work, family, friends, etc etc.  “Great” I thought to myself, “one more picketer just joined the queue, now where do they go to get a number”?

Those who fail to take time to look after themselves and see to their well-being, myself included, cite many reasons for their failure to do so.  Such reasons include being busy with work, extracurricular activities, family and friends, school, and sometimes noble causes such as saving the world (yeah, right)!  What we all tend to forget, however, is that the corner stone of all of this, whatever it is that’s keeping us busy that is, is, well, us.  If we’re unable to function, we won’t be able to attend to work, be there for our families, complete our schooling or even save the world, assuming we’re naive enough to think we can do that last one.

If you think about it, it’s not that complicated.  Jesus Christ, peace and blessings be upon him, captured it very well in his teachings to his disciples.  I don’t remember exactly which book in the bible and what chapter it is written in (I’m too busy saving the world to research it at the moment(), but he simply states that, if there was a piece of wood in your eye and a plank in your brother’s eye, you are to take out the piece of wood from your own, so that you may see enough to even know that there is a plank in your brother’s eye.  It never ceases to amaze me how often we tend to forget that, pretending instead to be so selfless and dedicated as to ill-treat our bodies and sacrifice our health, presumably for the sake of those things that are so dear to us.

Most important to me personally are my family, my work, my friends and the community causes in which I believe and for which I have chosen to dedicate a great deal of my time.  With an illness that left me almost handicapped for the better part of a month, I failed all those I mentioned above.  I couldn’t travel home to attend my brother’s wedding and see my family at a desperate time of need, I failed to fully and effectively capitalize on the momentum created by the various conferences and shows I attended this past summer for my work, I practically disappeared from the lives of my friends and loved ones, and lost track of many extracurricular activities to which I dedicated so much time and effort over the better part of two years.

  When you take the above, and add it to the sense of guilt and failure which, for most people like me, is usually multiplied under such circumstances, you will come to clearly see the terrible situation in which I managed to put myself, one for which there is no one else to blame.

I guess the lesson from this is clear:  it is not a selfish act to look after one’s self, in fact it is a very selfless act.  In my opinion (as if you really care), it’s as selfless as saving a total stranger from an inevitable calamity (which to most people is almost as selfless as it gets these days).  Failure to do so, the argument can be made, is the selfish act, as it clearly demonstrates our selfish desire to enjoy the short term euphoria of an accomplishment, rather than make the required sacrifice in time and effort to insure its long term continuity.

Oh, what was wrong with me you ask?  You know, we each have enough trouble of our own, and I’m not exactly sure you’d want to sit here and waist your time listening to mine, but suffice it to say that last month I came to see first hand what a true handicap really meant.  Terrible as it may have felt at the time, and despite the lingering effects which I think will be with me for sometime to come, I must say I now fully realize that being blind has nothing to do what so ever with a handicap.  Those who think otherwise, in my opinion, still have a lot to learn about the world, let alone blindness.

From this point on, I’m making a pledge to make a conscious effort at taking care of my own needs.  Time for myself is most important to me, more important than work, family, friends and whatever cause I happen to be involved in.  I don’t think this is selfish at all, it is in fact required if I am to be the good friend, the perfect family man, the exemplary worker and the great philanthropist I’ve always dreamed of being.  It’s time for me to get      my Oud out and play some music.  Yes, the reports and emails can wait.  The phone can wait.  My friends can wait, and the whole world will have to wait, for if I don’t replenish my supply of health, I’m afraid I may not be able to catch up.

I played the Oud since I was 10, and fell in love with it at an even younger age.  It is a centuries old fretless string instrument consisting of four double strings, with a fifth single string which was added to it in the latter years of its majestic history.  The closest western instrument to the Oud is the Lute, but I find that mentioning it confuses everyone but the music connoisseurs, as I don’t think Britney Spears used the Lute in any of her recent albums.

It is narrated that centuries ago, Ziriab, a master of music in his time, took the Oud to the palace of the Caliph, the title typically awarded to the ruler of the Muslim empire at the time.  He played a tune for the Caliph and his staff which made them so happy that they all started laughing and dancing.  He then played another tune which made them so sad they all started to cry, and played yet another tune which put them all to sleep.  It is said then that he walked out and left his instrument behind for them to see when they got up (believe me, such honesty can  come from a musician, despite what you learned about Mozart and Richard Wagner’s characters).

I could bore you with an exhaustive narrative of the instrument’s history, but you can do that to yourself without my help merely by searching for it on the Internet.  Instead, sit back and relax, and enjoy with me a wonderful Oud duet played for us by what I would have hoped would have been me, but since I was out saving the world, the honor was instead done by the Iraqi brothers Munir & Omar Bashir, who are well-known for their mastery of this incredible instrument.  The piece is a variation on the well-known theme from the Iraqi song “Fog El-Nakhel (Above The Palm Trees)”, which was sung by, well, every singer that ever sang in Iraq.  It combines this beautiful melody with a number of other equally well-known ones, creating a magnificent flow of heart capturing music.

If you are reading this article in a Podcast enabled  RSS reader, then the piece is already on your computer.  All you need to do is follow the instructions to find and play it, and as a bonus, you can even get to keep it!  If you don’t know what I’m talking about and don’t even care, then just click here to listen.  Either way, I truly hope you enjoy.    

Never judge a book by its cover, an interesting and strange travel tale

It was way past midnight, and I just landed at BWI in Baltimore, and after a 20 minute wait, I got into the Super Shuttle that was to take me to New Carrolton, where I would meet a colleague in the morning for an important presentation.  I’ve been to that customer’s site before, and I used to stay at a Ramada in Beltsville, which wasn’t too far from the client’s site, but my colleague booked the reservation this time.  He asked me about where we should stay, since I’ve been there before, and I told him that he should book us in at the Ramada near the client’s location.  When he went to the web site to make the reservation, he selected the only Ramada he could find in New Carrolton and booked us there.  When I made my shuttle reservation, I indicated that my destination was the Beltsville Ramada, since that was where I’d stayed before.

 

Just before take off, I thought I’d call my colleague and make sure he’s at the same place where I was going, and sure enough, he told me he was not.  He wasn’t in Beltsville, he was in New Carrolton proper!

 

It was well past midnight when my plane landed, and we didn’t hit the road until a little bit after one in the morning.  I inquired with the lady at the counter if there was any way they could change my destination from Beltsville to New Carrolton (they couldn’t possibly be that far from one another), she said that she could not help.  If I wanted to do that, I had to call the reservation office and sort it out with them.

 

After thinking about it for a split second, I decided that it may be too confusing for these folks if I had to make another reservation, and was worried that I’d have to do a lot of follow up afterwards if they charge my credit card twice.  I figured I’d go to Beltsville, and once there, I can decide whether I wanted to spend the night there or take a taxi to the New Carrolton Ramada.

 

I was a bit surprised when I got into the shuttle van at how loud the radio was.  The driver had the BBC on (apparently through one of the public stations), and he kept it on even after we hit the road.  There was myself and another couple in the van, and I could tell that the other couple were extremely tired!  They tried to ask the driver a couple of questions, but he was too focused on the news to here what they were saying, let alone respond to them.  While that was going on, I phoned the New Carrolton Ramada to inquire about how far they were from Beltsville, but they were unable or unwilling to provide any assistance.  I was a bit mad, but after having stayed there for three nights, I came to find out that this was standard business practice for them.  I concluded that this was yet another hotel to add to my “I’m never ever staying here even if they pay me” list.

 

The driver’s attachment to the news was unusual to me, and his disregard to the never spoken rule of “never disturb the passengers with radio or music that’s too loud” made me even more curious.  Having the BBC on, loud as it may be, never bothered me, especially that they were reporting live from Gaza!  In fact, I was so wrapped up in the news myself, and remember how I got so mad at them for talking so much about the suffering of those poor settlers who were having to abandon places they grew up in.  I was so mad that, from my seat, I sent the BBC an SMS (text message) on the number they advertise for that purpose – soliciting listeners’ comments.  I wondered in my message if those settlers ever bothered to think about the plight of the Palestinians they kicked out 57 years ago, some of whom don’t even have a home still.  I expressed that sentiment in my message, signing it with “Zuhair Mahd, a Palestinian American from Denver”.  I figured if the comment is broadcast on the air, the driver may recognize the sender, as he had my name and the place I was coming from on his passenger manifest, since I paid with an advanced prepaid reservation, but I didn’t care.

 

As I leaned back quietly in my seat, I just kept wondering why this man was so intently listening to the coverage, at the risk of drawing complaints and possibly protests from his tired late night passengers.  The passengers didn’t complain, and the ride seemed to go smoothly.  I wanted to engage the driver in a conversation, but I did not want to add to the noise, and besides, I wasn’t sure how he’d take my personal questions, especially in the presence of others.

 

The couple was dropped off first, and the driver and I continued on to Beltsville, when he turned to me all of a sudden, asking me if everything was OK with my hotel reservation, since he heard me talking to the hotel.  I explained to him my situation, and he instantly offered to take me directly to New Carrolton.  Taking him up on his offer, I thanked him very much, and used the opportunity to ask him the question that was nagging me, and that’s where he was from and why he was listening to the news so intently.

 

“I am from Israel” he said, “and I was listening because of the Gaza coverage”.  My heart sank.  Here’s a man who was doing me a great favor, and it is very likely that at any moment he may listen to my comment which I sent to the BBC.  I wasn’t sure what to do, and chose to continue the conversation with him and pretend that this meant nothing to me.  We said the generic “it’s really sad there and I wish that people would come to their senses” stuff, when he turned to me and said “you have a bit of an accent yourself, where are you from”?  “Palestinian” I said, “I hope that won’t make a difference” I continued with a faint smile.  “Oh no, absolutely not” he exclaimed!  “I have three passports” he continued, “an American, an Israeli and an Ethiopian”.  “Where in Israel do you live” I asked?  “When I’m there, I live with my wife in Telaviv.  I’m here to finish my graduate studies, and I used to work as a pilot for Ethiopian airlines.  I have a house in Telaviv, Addis Ababa, and I’m here for my studies”.

 

We continued to talk about Israel and how it wasn’t as Democratic as we’re lead to believe.  He began to tell me how there was blatant discrimination between the Eastern and the Western Jews, and referred to the story which I remember hit the news over 12 years ago, when the authorities threw out the blood of thousands of Ethiopian Jews who came to donate for a blood drive they were having at the time.

 

We continued to talk, and he started to tell me how Ethiopians are usually sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.  He surprised me though when he told me that he wasn’t Jewish, and that he was a Coptic Christian.  “Don’t you know?  30% of the Jews who migrated to Israel from Ethiopia aren’t actually Jews, they are Christians”.  I’ve always heard about the phenomena of persons from many countries, especially Ethiopia and Russia, claiming to be Jews in order to get out of their country and go to Israel, so that they may eventually make it to America, but never thought that I’d actually run into one of them.  We continued to talk, and when we arrived to the hotel, we exchanged warm regards and had a firm hand shake, usually a universal sign of friendship.  Upon offering him a tip, he refused to take it, and wished me a good night and drove away.

 

I wondered in the back of my mind how quick human beings are to judge each other.  We have gotten so used to profiling one another such that a person’s label or nationality give so many answers and lead us to a great deal of sometimes incorrect assumptions, causing us to hate and sometimes kill each other without a valid reason.  If I ever needed a reminder of how unique and special every individual on this earth is, that was it.

 

 

 

A touching experience

I wrote this a couple of months ago, but given my experiences this last week end, I wonder if it’s worth posting here.  It’s amazing how quick we are to come to judgment about others.  Sometimes if we care to take the time, we’ll gain a whole new dimension to the experience we’re going through.

 

 

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6/6/2005

I mostly forward things that I come across, but this is one I experienced myself, and feel compelled to commit it to writing because of how much it moved me.

 

Yesterday when I was taking a flight from Frankfort To Amman to see my family, and while waiting to board the aircraft, two men came and sat across from me and introduced themselves.  One of them was an Iraqi man, who was carrying his two year old son, whom he took to Germany for treatment.  The son was wounded in one of the American bombing raids, and some charitable organization helped him bring the little boy to Germany to see if there is anything they could do for him over there.  Unfortunately, the doctors told him that there was nothing they could do for his son, and that he will remain sightless for the rest of his life.  I guess that’s why the man came and sat across from me – he has just woken up to the fact that he too now has a blind son, and there is nothing anyone can do about that.

 

The man spoke no German, no English, in fact, he did not speak any foreign language.  The only language he spoke, so far as I could tell, was Arabic.  I tried to console him by telling him that blind persons these days can do so much because of the technology and awareness that exist.  I showed him my talking mobile phone and my talking computer, in order to prove to him that, even though I am a blind person, just as his son is, I am traveling the world, earning a decent living and living my life to the fullest.  He listened intently to what I had to say and uttered nothing except “well, that’s over there, over where they are, they have all these things, but what about us!”.  I must admit those words took me by surprise, and for a brief moment, I didn’t know what to say.  I regained my composure and tried to reassure him by telling him that all he can do is raise his son well, treat him just like everyone else, encourage him and make sure never to close any doors in his face, and that his maker will take good care of him.  I further told him that I was “there”, and through determination and perseverance, I managed to do what I wanted.  We left it there, as boarding began and chaos ensued.  The gentleman and his son were seated towards the middle of the aircraft, and I was seated all the way in the back, where a number of French, Swedish, German and other European passengers sat.

 

While the plane was landing, and right before we touched down, I heard one of the flight attendants say in a low, direct and angry voice, to someone who couldn’t hear her “sit down”.  A couple of seconds thereafter, the purser came on the speaker and said “sir, will you please sit down!”.  Landing continued, and by then we were taxiing on the ground in Amman, when, once again, the same flight attendant in the back was saying “can’t you listen, don’t you have ears”, in the same tone of voice as before.  No sooner has she finished uttering these words, the purser came on again with the same announcement “sit, down, sir!”.  An announcement was made a third time, and I can safely say that myself and others on the flight were getting concerned.  I guess the others were a step ahead of me as they could see what was going on, but it took me a while to sort it out, and I wish I never did!

 

Whilst still taxiing, the voice of a crying baby was coming closer to me.  I was sitting in the back, and the voice was edging ever so closely.  The baby would cry for a bit, gasp, go quiet and cry again.  Without uttering even a breath, the person carrying the baby was headed towards the back, and the flight attendants were getting quite nervous.  By the time he got to my row, the baby was crying uncontrollably.  The person carrying him, which, I came to realize, was a man, took him further to the back, trying to calm him down.  The man entered the galley in the back, and the flight attendants were quite worried by then.  “I don’t know what you’re doing” said one of the attendants, “but you are endangering the safety of yourself, your child and other passengers.  Stay! Away! From! The! Emergency! Exit!”, the attendant said in both anger and fear.  The baby continued to cry, and the man started calming his baby down by saying “shshshsh, yalla yalla yallla”, loosely translated as, hush, please, hush.  The man then turned around and left the galley, and stood directly to my left and started talking to his son.  I instantly recognized him – he is that Iraqi man.  My heart sank.  There he was, standing there, with everyone, people who looked strange to him, as strange as the people who took away his son’s eye sight, angrily staring at him, yelling at him, screaming at him in a language he does not understand.  His  silence, I’m sure, made a lot of people feel uncomfortable.  I’m sure there were people who thought he was a terrorist of some sort.  I’m sure there were people who thought he was an uncivilized dark skinned man, chaotic and uncontrollable as the rest of his people seemed to be.  What I am not sure of is whether people knew what was really going on inside that man’s head.  There he was, all alone, trying to calm down his son, his blind son, who cannot stop crying.  He was oblivious to everything around him, including the cries of the crew and the gazes of the passengers, partly because he couldn’t understand what they were saying, partly because he was attending to his son, but mostly because this seemed to be the man’s first or second time on an airplane.  Despite all of this, he remained absolutely calm, with nothing coming out of his mouth except “shshshsh, yalla, yalla, yalla”, and an occasional muttering of reassurance to his son in his own colloquial Iraqi accent.  I knew then exactly where this man was while everyone was doing this to him – he was staring into the eyes of the unknown, into his son’s future, a future which I’m sure he perceived to be full of nothing but pain for that poor little child.  He was, I am sure, trying to wake up to the reality of his son’s permanent disability, which, in a split second, replaced the happiness that comes with every new born.  He was standing there, naked of all feelings of pride, dignity, happiness, seeing nothing but darkness ahead.  I know this feeling quite well because this is how my mother told me she felt when she found out that I, her first and oldest son was blind.  She cried for years, until she started to have hope that I may one day live a normal life, but this man, this poor man, has just begun this painful journey, and what a way to begin!

 

As people started disembarking, I noticed the man making his way back towards the front.  I was following each footstep of his through the ceaseless crying of his son.  As the voice of his baby disappeared in the distance, I wondered in the back of my mind whether the flight attendants would have reacted differently had they known the man’s story.  I have no doubt in my mind that these beautiful young women would have been glad to take his son from him and hold him to their chests and see to it that he is OK.  I’m sure that, had they done that, this man would have been relieved, even momentarily, of his pane to see the caring and love in other people’s hearts instead of the angry cries and hostile gazes of the passengers.  It would have been a smile for everyone in the midst of a lot of tears for someone.  From what I could tell, no one but myself and the other person who introduced me to this man, who was sitting towards the front of the plane, knew about this man’s predicament, since we were helping him at the gate in Frankfort while boarding.  A word from me would have changed the night for many passengers, flight attendants, but most importantly for that man.  Alas, I just sat there bewildered, dazed and confused.  It was as if something has come over me, sealed my mouth, and froze my mind.  I wondered if it was too late for me to do anything.  I wondered if I could look for and find that man, even if I had to change my plans and cross the boarders into Iraq the following day.  Would I ever find him and his son I asked?  A voice inside me told me however that I probably wouldn’t, but that I would find many others in his homeland with his predicament, and many more who are probably even worse off!  Why did he come to the back though – I still wonder!  Did he come to see me?  Did he come to talk to me?  Have I failed him?  Should I have said something?  I don’t know, and I guess I’ll never know.

Beyond the label, where do we really stand in politics?

I spent this past week end at a retreat in the mountains for peace activists from the state of Colorado.  Ever since my return to the US early last year, I felt it was important for me to be active, in order to keep the way of life to which I was accustomed and with which I fell in love shortly after I came to this country.  Rather than complain and/or run away, I came to the conclusion that I owe it to myself and everyone I know to stop talking and to start doing something meaningful.  The present administration, I feel, is embarking on a dangerous path, and is on a course to strip us from many of the freedoms we’ve taken for granted for decades.  Through the use of covert political tactics and games, the exploitation of fear, the claims to morality and purity, this administration is changing the political landscape in this country, and is changing the system of checks and balances and the legal processes which kept this country running for a long time.  They have ignored the constitution, flouted international laws, spread chaos and instability around the world through foolish military actions, and alienated many of its closest allies and champions, turning them into enemies or harsh cynics.  I figured I could sit home and complain, or I can go out and do something to educate people about what’s happening and try to bring about change using the legal means still available to us.  The urgency of being active became clearer to me when I had my own personal brush with law enforcement in this country, after they paid me a visit only because I was Muslim, and with the sole purpose of fishing for information, making outrageous allegations in the process.  I have participated many times in actions put on by peace activists in the Denver area through out the past few years, and decided it was time to become even more involved.  Despite being conservative in my political views, advocating smaller government, lower taxes, a free market economy, and the power of states to decide their own matters, I felt that I shared enough views with the left to be active with them – as we seemed to see eye to eye on foreign politics, civil rights, race relations and the danger this administration pauses to our way of life.  Despite my bias against Liberals, and despite having been a harsh critic of them for years, I felt that they seemed to understand exactly what is happening now, and that they may therefore have the answers.  I’ve heard many things about them – they talked a lot, they had conflicting views on a lot of issues but offered no single stand on any, they were more interested in how people felt rather than coming up with practical solutions to society’s problems, but I figured this was part of the lies that Republicans have been feeding us – as they’ve been truly exposed lately, and decided to go in with an open mind.  I also thought that the issues are so clear that people would be compelled to focus more on action – after all we all understand what we’re up against.  So with my biases in a bag, and with what I thought was an open mind, I headed with a good friend to a nice spot outside of Salaida Colorado to join over forty other people to talk about the issues and come up with actions to deal with them.

 

The group, consisting mainly of white middle to upper class couples and individuals, was very interesting.  Almost everyone in the group was very intelligent, well educated, friendly and compassionate.  Almost everyone was in their fifties or older, and young people, though present, were so scarce that they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.  The absence of people of color was quite noticeable, so much so that I wondered sometimes if I was the only none white person around.  Fortunately, there were a couple more, but that was about it.

 

It did not take me very long to start noticing the group dynamics and how they effected the way the whole group functions.  It seemed as if each member of the group had his or her own views on what the issues were (or should be), and the actions necessary to deal with those issues.  The differences were not confined to the issues, but they went on to include the processes governing the interaction of the whole group.  What made it even more interesting was that the group almost entirely agreed to operate on consensus, rejecting any hierarchies what so ever.  There was no president, vice president, treasurer, chief, specialist, expert – each member of the group held the same weight.  Any mention of hierarchies was almost like a taboo, with no one daring to publicly speak about it (at least not in the meetings), even those who privately agreed that it may be necessary.  So with everyone deeply entrenched in what they believe, each having their own view of issues and actions, and many unwilling to compromise, meetings dragged forever, and decisions were often so elusive that it was sometimes difficult to know what they were (and to make matters worse, no one seemed to take notes).  People fought over definitions of very familiar words, and each wanted their own term or definition to be adopted.  The thing that came to my mind at the time was President Clinton’s statement during his deposition in the Paula Jones case in early 1998, when he said “it depends on what you mean by is”.

 

After an afternoon of throwing strings around to make connections, talking about triggers and how to deal with them, and a very badly bodged session on strategy in which the audience had a hard time deciding on what strategy to use for an example (despite the facilitator’s very good understanding of the subject matter), and after sitting through hours of discussion on one simple matter, my open mind suddenly disappeared, and my bag of biases was suddenly cut open.  Being a type A, someone who believes in taking care of business and playing hard afterwards, I was in pain.  I felt that each time someone spoke, they made the issue at hand even more murky, and sometimes creating outright hostility (though that tended to be short lived, and overshadowed by the plethora of others who wish to speak and who quickly took the discussion in a different direction).  I found myself looking at each and everyone as just another Liberal, just another Radical, someone who I absolutely cannot be around, let alone work with.

 

It didn’t take me long to realize that I have broken my promise to myself of being open-minded, and it was time for me to take a step back and try to contain my biases again.  I tried to look at ways in which I could make my presence useful to both myself and the group, so as to take away something from this week end.  I made a commitment to speak with as many of the individuals present and try to personally get to know them, as well as think of ways in which I can help them get to know me and build up enough credibility to where I can at least be comfortable sharing my views with them, and I believe I did.

 

As I got to know different individuals, I couldn’t help but notice the uniqueness of each of them.  Although there was reasonable consensus on many of the issues, I was amazed at how different people were when it comes to many other issues.  There were many who held what would be classified as conservative views on some issues, some who held extremely radical views, and others who had no views at all.  Despite all of that, everyone identified themselves as being Liberal, and seemed to do their best to conform.  I also found myself holding very liberal views on some issues even though I always thought of myself as a Conservative. 

 

On Saturday night, I got up in front of a subset of the whole group who got together to watch a movie, and shared with them the fact that I was conservative (well, I put it as Conservative actually).  I have, by then, come to personally know many of the people in that group with whom I talked about and mostly agreed on various issues.  As you can understand, I didn’t talk to everyone about every issue – we talked about whatever issue came up for discussion.  What I am trying to say is that not everyone knew my views about every issue, and in the same token I didn’t know everyone’s view about each issue.

 

When I uttered the word Conservative however, just as what happened to me the night before, I have no doubt that many people filled in the blanks regarding my views of the issues about which we didn’t talk.  This, I’m sure, has caused them to form an opinion of me, just as it caused me to form an opinion of them before.  Just as I quickly discovered, through talking to various members of the group, that I was wrong on many assumptions I made regarding those particular persons, I had no doubt that many people made assumptions about me that were simply incorrect.

 

As I left on Sunday, I couldn’t help but wonder whether labels really are an obstacle in the way of political action.  They are a simple way for us to categorize people and judge them, much like race, sex, language or ethnicity.  The trouble is that we may share all of the above, including political views, but because of a simple label, we may fail to see that in one another.  Another problem with labels is that they sometimes control us rather than us controlling them.  A Liberal, for example, feels that he or she has to shop at a health food store, has to be mostly (or wholly) vegetarian, has to hate the establishment, when they may not necessarily do so.  A conservative, on the other hand, has to be anti abortion, pro guns, support the troupes and blindly believe in capitalism.  The fact of the matter is that this is very far from the truth.  People may have different opinions on different issues.  Their backgrounds, religious beliefs, personality, interest and many other factors contribute to the shaping of those beliefs.  To paint people in one brush simply based on a label is tantamount to doing the same thing based on race, ethnic background, gender, nationality or religious beliefs.  We have come to find out how unhealthy this practice is when it comes to the above mentioned, but yet we seem to be blind to its destructive effect on political action.

 

I believe that the issues that confront us now transcend labels – in fact they transcend everything else.  Our way of life, our existence as a civilization are being threatened, and the lives of future generations, our kids and grand kids are going to be in danger.  It seems to me that we should take a step back, and try to see beyond the label, seeking practical and reasonable means to achieve our goals, rather than sticking to something that doesn’t work simply because it fits our label.  This doesn’t apply only to Liberals, as some may conclude from the above, it goes for everyone, regardless of what their political beliefs are, and regardless of the label they carry.  Let us remember that it wasn’t just Republicans or Democrats or Federalists who brought good things to this country, it was the people who did, the people irrespective of their ethnic composition and political views.

 

Tribute to a great man

Last Sunday, the seventh of August, the life of a great man came to an
abrupt end. Dr Russell Smith, founder and CEO of the now called Humenware,
which started out as PulseData International, died along with his wife when
their plane crashed in the see near Christ Church in New Zealand (see press
release pasted below).

I've met Dr. Smith three years ago in Birmingham in England, and we
instantly connected. I was based in the Middle East at the time, and we
talked about the possibility of localizing the Braille Note, Pulsedata's
flagship product at the time into Arabic. Ever since, Dr. Smith and I will
always seek out each other for a quick chat, wherever our paths cross. He
would always go out of his way when he sees me to say hi and catch up.

Dr. Smith is one of the founders of our industry. His work contributed to
the improvement of the lives of blind and visually impaired persons around
the world for the last thirty years. In an industry where money is scarce,
work is plentiful, Dr. Smith managed to sustain himself for a long time,
making both his life and the lives of millions of people better. He stuck
with it when many didn't, and always managed to find new avenues when others
deserted. Thank you Russell for all that you've done, and may you rest in
peace.

-----Original Message-----
From: HumanWare [mailto:us.news@humanware.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 4:38 PM
To: Zuhair Mah'd
Subject: Blindness Industry Mourns Loss of Innovative Leader

CONTACT: Jonathan Mosen - 925-566-9265 - jonathan.mosen@humanware.com

CONCORD, CA (August 9, 2005) - HumanWare announced today, with deep sadness,
the death of the company's founder and Chief Executive Officer, Dr Russell
Smith, and his wife Marian who were killed on Sunday, August 7th in the
crash of their Cessna 182. Russell and Marian, as they are known to most of
the blindness industry, were avid fliers who had built their own private
airstrip at their home in Aylesford, New Zealand. On Sunday while returning
home together from Nelson, their aircraft crashed into the sea north of
Christchurch.

"Russell devoted his entire working life to developing innovative technology
for people who are blind or visually impaired," stated Philip Rance,
President of HumanWare USA. "In his 30 years of service, he became an icon
and was recognized, honored and admired throughout the world." Rance added,
"His death, at age 60, is a huge loss to the blindness industry as a whole.
Both he and Marian will be greatly missed by family, friends, and colleagues
all over the world."

Dr. Smith graduated from University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New
Zealand, with B.E.(Hons) in Electrical Engineering and went on to complete a
Ph.D. degree in 1972. His doctoral research concerned new techniques for
designing transducers and information displays for under-water sonar
systems. He joined the Wormald International Group in 1975 to head a new
division which would develop the SonicGuide sonar mobility aid for the
blind. The benefit of Russell's earlier research in sonar techniques was
instrumental in ensuring the successful launch of this innovative product on
to the world blindness market. In 1976 Russell was appointed the first
Manager of Wormald International Sensory Aids Ltd, which became Pulse Data
International Ltd in January 1988 after a management buyout. In January
2005 Russell finalized a merger of the company with Canadian-based VisuAide,
and the new combined company was renamed HumanWare Ltd.

"Russell Smith was one of the fathers of our industry," notes Jim Halliday,
President Emeritus of HumanWare USA. "In the 30 years since we first meet,
he has inspired and driven the development of an amazing list of
technological firsts that have and will continue to create opportunities for
people who are blind or visually impaired." He emphasizes, "Russell's
legacy will live long after the rest of us are gone!"

Some of the "firsts" Smith's company have developed include:

Sonic Guide (1976) - the world's first sonar-based electronic travel aid.
Mowat Sensor (1978) - the world's first hand-held electronic travel aid.
Viewscan (1980) - the world's first portable, high contrast, large print
reading system employing a hand-scan camera and a flat-panel display using
7,000 light pixels.
Viewscan Text System (1983) - the world's first portable, large print, word
processing system.
Keynote (1986) - the world's first portable, talking word processor.
The Viewpoint VGA (1989) - the first video magnifier to support a split
screen computer connection with an industry standard computer display.
SmartView (1995) - the world's first video magnifier to introduce built-in
date, time, and calculator functions.
SmartView Xtra (1999) - the first video magnifiers to achieve "plug and
play" capability with a wide range of PC display formats.
BrailleNote (2000) - the world's first true Braille PDA
myReader (2004) - the world's first low vision auto-reader

As well as being Chief Executive of the HumanWare Group, Russell was
Chairman of the Board of the group's Europe, Australia, USA, and Canada
subsidiary companies. Rance acknowledged, "Although we are a very solid
company with teams in place to manage effectively well into the future, we
will all miss Russell's inspiration and guidance, his tenacity, and his kind
humanity. He and Marian will leave a huge void in all of our lives."

A memorial service will be held in the US to honor of Dr. Russell Smith -
Date and location to be advised.

About HumanWare

HumanWare designs and manufactures innovative technology for people who are
blind or visually impaired. The company's products include integrated speech
and Braille technology, a range of video magnifier solutions, screen reading
software and speech synthesizers. For more information about HumanWare,
visit www.humanware.com.

HumanWare
175 Mason Circle
Concord CA 94520
800.722.3393
www.humanware.com

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