When I was in Jordan I attended a small party for hospital employees hosted by a filthy rich drug company. We were having dinner, as I was enjoying my fifth dish I noticed the janitor eating cold falafel which was placed on the side.
I told him "Why are you eating falafel, go have some pizza, it's hot and goood"
He said, "Don't wanna eat pizza, I'm afraid I might like it, and I can't afford it, so I'll miss it then I would feel miserable"
I loved his answer, a man of plenty of wisdom and scarceness of money. If you don't try something you'll never miss it. If you don't get sick you won't know how great it is to be healthy. As my best friend Aerosmith says in his Mo3allaqaat "You got to lose to know how to win".
This could explain why the rich are less happy than the poor; they've got more, and the more they got the more things they are gonna miss as time passes. Being rich is a measure of the things you have that money cannot buy. Those things are very precious and once lost they cannot be replaced.
We have a choice to catch up with the world and sometimes we need to, otherwise the average age of death for any Jordanian would still be 49 years (statistics from 1945) . We're moving forward quickly, we're trying to run as fast as we can to catch up with the pace. Nice, we've got smart and ambitious young generation that can do the job at this point of time.
Our only "oil" according to late King Hussein is the human being and the more educated and skillful a Jordanian is the more likely s/he is willing to leave the country and live abroad, and it doesn't look like it's gonna change soon.
Not a long time ago, most of what Jordanians seeked was some delicious falafel and bread, a bus that can take them to work and the ability to enjoy raising kids and providing them with any kind of education to enable them to grow up in a secure environment.
These days there is true poverty in Jordan that never existed before, real ignorance, amazing levels of primitivism of thinking that were not present at the times people were illiterate and schools were virtually nonexistent, all that on top of a competitive level of corruption that is not spoken about. With all combined I'm only concerned that one day or another we'll stumble and fall and then the falafel will taste bitter instead of sweet and a trip in bus can feel like hell and raising kids will sound like a punishment from God and we will realize then that falafel intoxication was much healthier than a "withdrawal from pizza".
4 hours ago
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36 comments:
i love this post..full of wisdome..thanks for writing it!
But I thought we were already at that stage really !
What an amazing answer. Funny though, if it was me I would have had it, and enjoyed it and not thought about it after. I guess each person is different, maybe he knew it would effect him if he had it.
Interesting post.
3ash alfalafel the friend of the poor.
Let me focus on Falafel here. We Jordanians have the proble of "de-falafilization" of our life once we are abroad. I remember spending 14 days on Germany once and at the 11th day I saw a falafel van in a street in Berlin and I stopped the bus and ran under the rain to get my hot falafel. It was like a treasure found.
As for your wisdom I totally agree with it and in that sense I am gonna buy me some falafel right now.
Even a falafel and hummos is getting more and more expensive. The problem with the current situation in jordan is that there's not enough salaries to give, that's for governmental jobs, but the other thing that nobody talks about, is that some bigh rich assholes who own private companies, they just give employment salaries at the minimum wage determined by the government, although they could afford to pay much more. All this causes to widen the area between the rich and more, the middle class is starting to vanish. Maybe now with the jordanian direction to obtain more foreign investments in certain projects for tourism, culture, and economics, that will help provide more jobs to the public, and more salaries.
summer... thanx
anonymous... some people did already reach it, but i'm afriad it will become much worse
7aki fadi... looks like he tried something like that before.
hamede... sa7tain
Batir... Falafel costs more than a egular pizza in the US, or let's say 2 sandwishes of falafel are more expemsive than one large pizza with one topping
Yazan i think the middle class is almost gone already. IF a family cannor afford to pay the tuition fees of their sons and daughters in public univeristies then that's not middle class anymore
yazan u nailed it! its GREED that's killing us, not only greediness of filthy rich corporates but also of everyone who has a great idea to implement, the only thing the new generation is thinknig about is how to turn every idea into "money generating" business, greed! knowing that the richest ppl on earth really started out without money in mind, bass we are being brain washed...
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