What are we going to do about it?

I guess I've been keeping quiet these past few days! Even though I was busy, I haven't been completely away, I was lurking around the blogosphere, reading, pondering, and trying not to let my fury and frustration get the best of me. The past few days have taken me to blogs spread out in different corners of the world, and it was fascinating to see the different discourse and some fundamentally different ways people see things.

Ok so obviously I'm trying to avoid the words "Danish" and "Cartoons" here. This evening while driving I was listening to Ammannet's coverage of the parliament session… and I have no idea how I didn't just switch to a different station! How can we expect the people to have smart, educated, civilized reactions, when political leaders and people of influence just feed the emotional violent discourse?? Aaaahh if only you listened to the speeches of those MPs, I only heard about four, so I don't want to generalize, but the ones I heard were just being repetitive, redundant, without one useful or well-thought-out idea for what to do about the situation.

Here are some of the stuff I've been reading:

Ahmad Humeid's wonderful and superbly-written posts
Karim at One Arab World
Keefieboy, a perspective from a Brit in Dubai
Secular Blasphemy; a different view of what's happening


Reading the emails from my friends in Lebanon and other fellow MERYANers has encouraged me to try to get out of the depressed mood and think differently. I will leave you with the message our friend Tareq sent:

What are we going to do about it? What are thealternative ways that we can non-violently pass our message and position?

What is an appropriate response that reflects ourvision as a group of young activists committed tocivic dialogue in the region?

A lot of constructive and positive ideas have been presented on the blogosphere, and I'm just wondering how mainstream media can pick that up so that more people are exposed to it, and more people are triggered to think before they jump into irrational reactions. Would a powerful channel like Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya air a talk show of moderate young people trying to get a different message across? Just a thought…

Any ideas are welcome!


May be the solution is not a short-term action that we take in direct response to this, but a continuous effort to build our societies, to work for more awareness, more openness, more cultural and political development, to have a generation of young people who are not just either apathetic or reactive. I know that "freedom of expression" is not exactly the favorite term in this part of the world these days, so I don't think it would be a good idea for me to bring it up now, but can we at least not pretend that everything is perfectly ok in our countries and our societies and that we are above everyone else! Today, more than ever, we need change, and we need change that's from within!