Archive for November 21, 2023

A Mideast Thanksgiving

Posted: November 21, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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Thanksgiving Day, 1984

By Christopher Harper

Only some people in the Middle East really understand Thanksgiving Day. More often than not, that might be because there is little to be thankful for.

In 1984, I brought together a group of Lebanese, Syrians, and a bunch of Europeans in the middle of one of the most dangerous parts of the world. Many of us worked in some way for ABC News in Beirut and Damascus.

It was difficult to travel between the two cities as foreigners, so I decided we should meet near Baalbeck, an ancient city about six miles east of Beirut and just about the same distance west of Damascus.

The Romans built an exquisite city there, which had become a training center for terrorists. Ironically, it was about the only place that we could get people from Syria and Lebanon to meet, where most of them could be safe. Americans—actually, I was the only one—weren’t so safe. But I had spent a lot of time in Baalbeck, and I was young and rather foolish back then.

The infamous Commodore Hotel in Beirut found a turkey and some sweet potatoes—no small feat—and added some traditional Arabic dishes. I still remember how the chefs put everything on platters.

The group of about 20 people included:

  • Two British and French videographers who didn’t get along too well.
  • Two Syrian and Lebanese businessmen who didn’t like one another.
  • Two Shia and Druze men who didn’t trust one another.
  • Others who didn’t think much of me.

The sun shone brightly over the Bekaa Valley, a beautiful but troubled part of the world. No one talked about football games or family feuds. We didn’t talk about failed peace negotiations or the deaths of more than 200 U.S. soldiers sent to Lebanon as peacekeepers and killed by Islamic terrorists. We didn’t talk about the bombing of Lebanon by U.S. ships. We spent a wonderful afternoon talking about the present and the future, our families, and our dreams. We talked about everyday and important things in life. We drank a bit too much wine and araq, a potent Middle Eastern liqueur.

We left with a better sense of what we knew about one another and what we did not know about one another. More importantly, we talked about what we had in common as human beings.

A Primer on Real Life Pt One: I’m Old Enough to Remember When This Was Real Life 101

Posted: November 21, 2023 by datechguy in culture
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I was looking at Stacy McCain’s site and he quoted a stat from Douglas Murray that I recall Rick Santorum advancing during his quest for the 2012 GOP nomination which unfortunately he lost to Mitt Romney who lost to Barack Obama whose 2nd term is the primary source of a lot of the ills we are facing today.

The stat is as follows:

However, one of the key insights Murray found from studying poverty statistics was that any young American had a 97% chance of avoiding long-term poverty if they accomplished just four simple things:

1. Get at least a high school diploma.
2. Get a job and keep working.
3. Get married and stay married.
4. Don’t have children before you’re married.

Is this too much to expect? Is this an impossible obstacle to overcome?

For dozens of generations these basis steps (with the exception of the high school diploma which only became common in the late 19th century) were considered so natural and so normal that they didn’t even have to be said. Then again during that same time nobody needed to be a biologist to define “woman” or “marriage” either.

The sad thing is the days when these facts were known by all are in fact still in living memory but my generation of baby boomers, unable to cope with the safe and secure world that their parents had given their blood sweat and tears to bequeath them ran away from these values and thus now their children and grandchildren are at a point where you have them idolizing a terrorist whose primary ambition was to kill them.

But the idolization of Bin Laden and even the Hamas Terrorists have a more basic source, the forgetting of just how lucky they are to be in the position they are in. All of this is achieved in erasing history and forgetting the collective acquired wisdom of millennia that were the building blocks on which their lives were made.