Radio Cairo Days.... Then and now II

Seven years in a seventeen square meter room, tiny nook to cook in, and the wc and shower out in the hall, and there wasn't much heat out there in winter, but you could turn the shower on to very hot.

The night I moved it, it was very late, early in the morning actually, but Habji sort of corralled me. He was from Cairo, and was wide awake and wanted to talk and talk, and I was exhaustedly tired. I learned he was a coptic christian.... (whatever that was, I thought at the time...) And he was friendly, but I thought he was sort of devious.

Well... before I knew it, his friends occupied the other two free rooms after the heroin addicts moved out, please don't ask, they scared the hell out of me one night.... (Don't freak, it was a bad part of town, hey...)

So the radios going all around that house were stations from Cairo. I went off to work twelve hours a day, they did what they did, and occasionally, we'd stop for a moment, and really discuss what rocked their world. They didn't want to be here, and were homesick, but they wanted to go back and have the education to help them advance.

They never bothered me.... I never bothered them.

B'ut when it came to the foreign policy of the US... it was always the same.

I'm beginning to get a sort of chuckle out of how perceptions have changed, and the elite nor most of the media in the US aren't really understanding it.

The most radical come from their own offspring, the best educated, and not all this fear mongering that the poor are going to rise up. Putting that via the total entertainment media, the news... it only makes people think of what they can't have.

Then: a Pakistani backing me against a wall. He fucking hated me, because I came from America, he despised me. He would be in a room, I would come in to see a friend, and he would S'TORM out in the most histrionic way possible to show his outrage. Wouldn't talk to me. Didn't blame him, but took it personally, I wanted to know why.

And that is when he said, 'Your country comes in and takes our treasures and rescources. They take all that is valuable. And give us fish.' 'You want to be a good country? 'TEACH us to fish.'

People have no relationship in their minds to what they manufacture, or where it might GET to, or what consequences it might have. They make things. Then owners sell them. The least consciensous of them sell them indiscriminately for the highest profit. That is the market we always hear about, right? And something someone made... has no relationship to them, right? It''s just a tear gas cannister, after all, and am surprised they don't have inscriptions like on the bombs the air force uses. Or the ones in WWII.

I wouldn't even be sure if the manufacturers know where their products are going. Price is right? You sell.

But there is a hitch....

The brand goes out into the world. Even people who aren't educated can be tear-gassed, and pick up a cannister, and see that it was manufactured in the US.

The world is fucked up, have said so for decades. People exploit, and some really horrible ones seem to want to set the world on fire again and again and again till it hurts... and if you've never been really out in the world... the elitist strategy SUCKS.