Tuesday January 13th, 2004
My neighbors, well the store next door really, is run by Mauritanians. A small Islamic country north of here. Anyway, we (the US) dropped off some military folks to make our presense felt, and pay a few corrupt officials to let us wander around in the desert and talk tough about terrorism. Well, shortly after that, our neighbors stopped looking at me, and actually shuddered when I walked by, and have been asking Jen a ton of questions about me. Great. They were really nice to me, and then all of a sudden… fear. I wonder if they know I am american and jewish? That would be a joy now, wouldn’t it. Well, I hope things settle down. I hope there isn’t any trouble… although, the worst I can imagine is being run out of town.. but that is highly unlikely. I may just have to do my shopping eleswhere. Fucking asshole American Military. The worst part is that this ‘fighting terrorism’ is total bullshit. You can’t fight terrorism, it’s a tactic, not an enemy. And even if it were, you can’t fight it the way that they are pretending to. Life here is not nearly organized enough to do that. Many people here have never had identity papers. There hardly any real government control in the sense that we measure it here. What we are really doing is trying to keep poor people poor and harmless. We are making freedom of movement, freedom of speech and assembly pay to play activities. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about how much of a total fraud this all is. Actually, that doesn’t make me sick. It is that most people want to believe it.. that is what makes me sick.