back in the saddle
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| my city is still breathing back in the saddle |
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Monday, July 10, 2006 I can't sleep. I stayed up an hour or so later than I should have, finishing off Khalad Hosseini's The Kite Runner, and now find myself unable to sleep. Part of it, I'm sure, is the book and the ideas it has brought to my head, and part, likely, is me, unwillingly, returning to the nocturnal state that I often find myself in - that my body seems to prefer... The Kite Runner has left me uncertain about my feelings on Afghani-American relations, or Afghani-Canadian relations, or, even, Afghani-WORLD relations. While I realise the book is a biased work of fiction, the way the Taliban are depicted in the book (and, the way we have seen them on the news over the years) leaves me almost applauding the American's eventual entrance into Afghanistan, even if it was for, possibly, the wrong reasons. And makes me question why a united front didn't go in there sooner... That said, I wonder, as well, if anything they're doing, or we're doing, I guess, could possibly help, could possibly change things... I mean, wasn't it, arguably, a foreign power that got Afghanistan to the place they were at in 2001, and who can say that another foreign power will get them out of it. Is civil society at a place today in Afghanistan that one can see a democracy, or some other form of relatively stable government, forming? Either way, is the right way to get to this point really for Americans and Canadians and other Western powers to go in? I, at one point, would likely have said no. And I'm still torn on the subject - part of me thinks the entire idea of pulling out or not going in or letting the people there deal with their own problems is akin to ignoring it altogether, and you really can't ignore ethnic clensing, can you? That said, I still don't know what sending in the guns will do, especially into a country that's already lost so much, especially in terms of population and infrastructure. And what right do we have, way over here in North America, to tell someone half a world away how to run their country and live their lives? But what right do we have to turn a blind eye to the injustices happening in them, or to acknowledge them with a slap on the wrist? I realise this debate has been raging for 5 years now, but this book has led me to re-examine my feelings on the whole issue. I don't have any answers, but at least I've begun to think about it again... posted by kim | 4:23 a.m.|
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