Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Foreigners

I love that peole from Europe love to converse. Maybe it's just because I am in a coffee shop atmosphere, but whenever foreigners come in they seem to want to genuinly talk, and not just about small things; they will talk in depth about real topics. I had a conversation with a Czech today about his time in the French legion, apparently he was a French mercenary in the Congo and for a brief period in yugoslavia.
He showed me a huge scar he had on his head from some wound he had recieved during service and he told me that war is bad no matter what. It was interesting because a table national guard members were eating right behind him, and he continued to comment on their naivety. He talked politics and the nature of the Palestinian conflict ( with only a hint of slovokian anti-semitism) without worrying whose toes he might be stepping on. I found it incredibly refreshing. In America, there is such an imbattled political climate where if you say something that someone objects to, you cannot even carry on discussion because the ideologies are so defined. But I guess when you are able to look at a country from the outside you don't necessarily have the emotional ties that someone from that nation has. I wish none of us had beliefs.

-- Post From My iPhone

3 comments:

  1. But if we didn't have beliefs, there would be no moral repugnance and ethical opposition to what is now called war (I mean by this wording that war meant something very different before the domestic assault, explosive ordnance war that we know today, which is my belief).

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  2. you lost me when you moved into parenthesis (parentheses sp?)

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  3. fundamental extremist americans

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