A Reason to be Depressed

I went nearly a month and a half without posting, and some of that was because I was in the US and had only limited internet usage. But the other thing was that I was depressed about a lot of things - I can chart my moods here in Al Ain almost exactly by the number of blog posts that I make per month.

Anyway, this comment at The Corner, the National Review's group blog, was the last thing that I tried to blog about before I gave up.

I really don't know what to say about this. It is so very frustrating when people do things like this, especially when it is out of ignorance. I emailed the author, who, evidence here not withstanding, is not a hateful or stupid person, to explain that this was not a reason to be depressed at all, but happy and hopeful. Just look at how Mrs. Bush's trip was covered in the Gulf News, with three articles, all very positive.

Understanding starts with context. One of the first things that I noticed when I came here was that I had a hard time interpreting behavior sometimes. The example that always stands out to me was my first shopping trip to Carrefour. I had only been here a few days and had not met many people outside of the hotel. An Arab kid (about 10 or so) rammed the cart he was pushing into the back of my legs. When I turned around, he and his father were just staring at me blankly. Back home, I would have expected an apology. So I was confused. Was was being slammed into like this just normal behavior that everyone expected and so did not apologize for, or were these two being jerks? In the US, I would have known. Here, I had no cultural context to put the incident into.

Of course, I have also met Ms. Lopez's counterparts here too. I once had a conversation with a co-worker in which I tried (and I'm pretty sure failed) to convince him that there are millions of Americans that dislike the worst excesses of Western culture. He could not believe it. He told me that he might believe that there are a few thousand, but not millions. It was like trying to convince an Islamophobe that most Muslims hate terrorism. And like them, he had no first hand experience with what he was talking about. He had formed his opinion based solely on what he had seen in the media.