Thursday, March 1, 2007

Just another high school track

I found it quite interesting in the story; Exodus from Egypt: metal fatigue, how he describes the track in Cairo as looking like "a high school field in Lubbock, Texas or Butte, Montana. It seems as though in comparison to some of the other places Horwitz saw, Cairo was the best. It seemed to be the closest to America. Earlier in the book he also describes how he enjoys Cairo and how beautiful it is. During many parts in the book, I found myself thinking about how awful the Middle East is and how different we are from them. But this showed me that, although it's only one small part, not all of the Middle East is baron wastelands filled with crooks and thieves and criminals. Some places could be very similar to us.-AB

1 comment:

Baghdad Blog said...

My interpretation of what you just wrote is that we need to be more positive. As cheesy as it sounds, we should not focus on the negatives of a place like Middle East quite so much. We should be constructively critical, because of our beliefs of radical change needed, but the exclusivity of complaints and insults does not solve anything. Another thing is that even some of the descriptions of wastelands sound like home. I am not saying at all that I have been exposed to much ugliness, nor that New England is dirty. But we do have both scenic vistas here that are breathtaking. There are some other places, like public dumps, that make us want to ask ourselves why we go through so much trash. We have cleaning up to do too, but maybe not to the extent that many Middle Eastern countries do. I am sorry to admit that recycling bins are not the answer to the ‘baron wastelands’ of the Middle East. –C.S.