Perspective

Two of the Danish students have dropped out of school here because they have fallen in love. Very sweet and romantic, except that the girl traveled here with her boyfriend of six years. The boyfriend is obviously not the one she fell in love with. So all three of these Danes are in the same program, and to avoid the incredible awkwardness, the love birds have decided to travel around Europe for a while before deciding what they will do next. All of this is a build up to: last night was their going away party. Most of the people there were Danish, and thus I couldn't even pretend to understand them when they spoke to each other. Three other "foreign" foreigners that went too, so I spent much of the evening talking to Czech and Slovakia, and Lebanon. Lebanon knows more about American politics than I do, because he reads a lot. He reads the news of the net, he reads biographies, the dude just reads. And he likes Bill Clinton. He read Bill's autobiography. He despises Jr. for the two wars we've got going on, not because he thinks terrorism is somehow okay or that Saddam was a good guy, but because he knows that the war on terror is making more enemies and that the weapons of mass destruction were never the real reason for invading Iraq.* Slovakia, on the other hand, doesn't like Clinton. For him, Reagan and Bush make it possible for him to study English and travel.** All Clinton did was drop bombs on his friends in Serbia. Also, he doesn't like that Bill lied about the affair. On the constitution, which he holds to be sacred. I don't remember precisely if the word he used was sacred, but the effect was the same. And I have to admit that he has a point. If you hated living under communism, you are going to love the men who saved you from it. We also discussed several films that I have not, but should have seen already. Bowling for Columbine being one of them. I got to tell them that of CNN things that have freaked me out, the Columbine shootings places higher than the Twin Towers for me. I spent an afternoon watching kids being evacuated from their school as two of their classmates decided who to shoot. I might be less disturbed by the plane hijackings because I didn't actually see it as it happened.*** In regard to the bullying brought up in Bowling, Slovakia asked me if it really is that common in America and I had to respond that it probably is. I'm not up on my statistics or anything, and I don't know how Moore portrayed the bullying. I asked how things are in Slovakia, and he responded that kids are becoming more rude. Eastern Europe can see every trend before it surfaces in their countries because everything (emphasis was on everything bad) comes through Western Europe from America.

*I am generally more angry about the poor support and armament that some of our soldiers are coming back complaining about, and the general use of economic warfare which is just as destructive, but doesn't make us look quite as dirty.
**On the subject of communism, people here seem confused by the Communist Party t-shirt. I like it for the pun. Argentina and one of the Italians were discussing it on Monday, and he thinks that the joke is Marx laughing at the dupes who put his social theory into practice.
***The Italian did see the attacks live and responded to it with a post-War of the Worlds disbelief at first. Surely this wasn't happening.