Back on the Job
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
47
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Edmonton,
Alberta,
Canada
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
I want to leave it at that, but the events this summer make me want to comment on my thoughts after being in the Middle East. I was in Dahab and in Lebanon, and had a great time in both of these places. First to see Dahab blown up at the end of April, at an intersection I walked through four times a day, to see it on world headlines and to know it pretty well, is a huge shock. It's depressing and frustrating but I've decided that I have to take it at face value and be glad that I saw the place in the moment that I did, without the spectre of terrorism hanging over it.
But this wasn't that new to me, really. How many places have I been to that have been bombed by Islamic extremists in the last five years? NY, London, Madrid, Istanbul, Marmaris, Antalya, Beirut, Amman, Jerusalem, Dahab, Cairo, and just about everywhere else in Egypt. It's a new reality. But even after another attack I'm not afraid of it. There is too much to see and do to be cowed by a chance at "winning" in a bad-luck lottery.
Then Lebanon had another war. I was on Reuters.com every minute trying to see what got hit next. I don't know if I was hoping to see stuff I knew not get hit or what. I spent the duration of it wondering if the people I met were okay, feeling awful that the country that seemed so promising was sinking back into the mire. But I thought too of my Hezbollah minibus and the fellow who was off to fight with the Taliban. And over there on the Israeli side with their preoccupation with security. I suppose I was lucky to get in during a lull.
There were the mass evacuations that made me think of war in another way, the travellers who travel not by choice. There were the masses of refugees and I could have been one of them had I waited four months to go to Lebanon. I had the thought in my head every day at work and I thought it repeatedly like a mantra. Oddly enough, I wished I was there to see it first hand (I have a deep suspicion that most of you reader will not be able to understand that). I do wonder what it would be like to be a war journalist, like those whom I met in Beirut.
Update: A couple of days ago more bombs went off in Turkey. It is discouraging to see that peace is so fragile. It's tough to get my thoughts around all of this. It's a blow every time that it happens. But life goes on.
