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Cairo is dumbstruck - thunder and lightning and rain has accompanied today's Chamsiin, the sandstorms that sweep in weekly from the sahara to cover the city in a yellow dustcloud. Outside children are crying and laughing and screaming "allah'wa'akbar!" while I hide from the tempest on the houseboat which is rocking away on the wind-blasted nile. People here cannot seem to handle the rain - they get paralyzed, huddling together in ahwas and homes, unable to go about their normal lives. An oppressive regime, extremely poor living conditions, a poisoned river, lead levels five times the allowed amount - none of these things worry Caireans half as much as the rain, or so it seems.
Western interests and monetary aid have made Egypt into what looks like a partially modernized, east-meets-west state where the people are, above all, confused. The Mcdonald's outlets on every streetcorner and the amount of "free" westerners living here keeps up an image of a westernized free society - an image that conrasts wildly with the amount of military and police in the streets, with the lack of freedom of opinion, and with the total lack of political participation and power in the Egyptian population - the "parliament" and Mubarak's weak shows for the galleries have, in effect, no real basis at all. Western interests keep money flowing to the regime, allowing them to keep the people "free" of taxes and thereby devoid of economically bought influence. The government continues it's fifty year old promise to give everyone a job, no matter if it's just sitting on a chair for twelve hours a day, no matter if every restaurant or shop is already filled with unenthusiastic underpaid staff, no matter if you want to become a lawyer or a doctor - you take the job you are given and the status quo is kept. The military and the police continue to employ a huge amount of the population - often to sit on a street all day watching, for example, an arabic school for westerners, for around 30 egyptian pounds (around $5) per month. The average annual income of egyptian citizens for the last fiscal year was 7276 pounds ($1100) and that's based on registered workers, not counting the millions living in trash cities and more millions whose incomes are not registered. When the prime concern is trying to make a living for you and your family, democracy, environmentalism and human rights seem far from most peoples' minds. Rich people can worry about these things - it is not easy to think about the exhausts from you taxi or your lack of political influence when you have to work three jobs just so your kids can survive.
Adding to the mess, advertisments and western products allow some people to live the illusion of the west world, an illusion based on brands, consumerism and a very warped idea about western freedom - the freedom to buy things. The ideal for many people seems to be a pair of Nike shoes, entrance to clubs bearing signs that say "no traditional garb" and sunday dinners at KFC. There is virtually no cultural pride among these people - all they seem to want is to live the in plastic pop culture of the west and they can not seem to see the power of their own heritage, the beauty of their religion, their old poetry, their architechture, their rich history and their values of humanitarianism and compassion. If these people could regain their pride and their belief in themselves, if they did not see themselves as inferior, then maybe some day we could experience a trade of the great ideas of east and west - but as long as the status quo is kept by the means spoken of above, as long as they are fed the bullshit consumerist propaganda of western corporations, as long as their religious practices are based on unquestioning submission to politico-religious authorities, the confusion will continue.
(These are of course all layman's impressions of what is going on in this country. I do not claim any detailed understanding of the political systems of the middle east.) |
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