Lotteries were something brand new to me when I came here. Watching people head off to buy a score of tickets, I wondered why they bothered. The real money is in running the lottery: the Ontario govt. has fired the province's entire lottery board for lavish spending. Shades of Oxfam, this is.
I'll never understand the lottery thing in North America because what people seem to be trying to escape via winning the big one is not really all that bad. But then again, look what I have to compare life (and work) here to:
A worker at a nuclear facility in Dimona, Israel is accusing his former employer of making him and others drink uranium as part of an experiment. Whilst this was going on, former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert was swindling Jewish charities; but let's stay focused. In places like Malawi, children working on tobacco plantations get poisoned by two packs worth of nicotine daily. People in South-east Asian and Middle Eastern cities work about 1/4 more hours yearly than their counterparts in Europe and here. And for what? To take a day off for Qadaffi's 40-year dictatorship anniversary?
People there don't have enough time in the day to go to rehab for internet addiction like they do in the U.S. Nor do they have the time for designer drugs - about 9 out of 10 bank notes in the U.S. show cocaine traces.
Cops in India have even taken on second jobs - specifically taking a whopping $4.5 billion worth of bribes annually from truckers. When they are actually on the beat, they're abducting 11-year-olds in order to coerce confessions from parents.
However, things should slow down in the world since it's Ramadan. The holy month is given special attention in South African prisons, where counseling and prayer rooms are being offered to observers. London's mayor even encouraged non-Muslims to fast for a day to understand their Muslim counterparts better.
In Somalia though, Hizbul Islam and Al-Shebab militants have turned down the government's offer for a Ramadan truce, saying that they will defeat the latter even through the month of fasting. Hamas has similarly kicked up its oafishness by threatening to expel women who don't go by its strict dress-code at schools. The country of my birth, the UAE, is kicking out Palestinians and Lebanese Shi'ites for, well, being all that they are. This is hardly the time for non-solidarity: Israel has suggested the idea of an alternative homeland for Palestinians in Jordan.
Perhaps Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi was right that what the Middle East needs is a Canadian model for development and co-existence. Not really. I tend to agree with the sarcastic replies to his article, that there are very few Gulf Arabs here. And to add to that, when they do get out here, they seem to drown themselves in everything they can't get back home more than studying and comparing ways of life. Also, do we really want to be a region that deports elderly Polish women?
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