Not half bad

As students are welcomed back to IU, ready to settle into their usual Bloomington routine, I find myself having a harder time readjusting than in years past.
 
It’s not because I’m having some sort of existential crises or anything, but because I haven’t been back to Bloomington in more than nine months. In December, I left IU to go home to Chicago, and I boarded a plane to Cairo, Egypt, a month later.
 
My homecoming was slightly disheartening, to say the least. The excitement of being home after four and a half months was muted by how different America was when I left.  
The last tank of gas I pumped into my car in January cost me $2.72 a gallon. The first one I pumped into my car in June cost me $4.28. Food prices had gone up, quantities had gone down. In the last month alone I watched three “special reports” on various news channels chronicling once-middle-class families being forced to turn to food pantries.    

Add to that the tension in the air over the 2008 election. I arrived back in the states just as the Clinton and Obama saga was drawing to a long overdue, awkward close. The end result is that we now have a decrepit Bush-Lite Republican candidate and a Democratic candidate who styles himself “A New Hope,” possibly as the result of watching too much Star Wars. I get the vibe I’m not the only one somewhat put off by this year’s election options. 

To say the least, I was not thrilled with the state of the union when I came home. But then I thought of my time in Egypt. The same problems affecting us hit Egypt (and the rest of the world), too. But might I venture to say it hit them harder. If a prosperous nation like America can be hit by the international food crises, imagine the effects on a country like Egypt, where 40 percent of people live at or below the poverty level.
And unlike the American people, Egyptians have a harder time speaking out. While I was in Egypt, I personally witnessed a peaceful pre-planned workers’ strike quashed by riot police, complete with university students being arrested for holding picket signs. In Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship, there is little or no room for expressing discontent. Makes our complaints about Bush and company pale in comparison, doesn’t it? 

While young IU graduates might have a harder time finding a job that meets their expectations in this recession economy, Egypt’s youth have to spend years waiting to get married because they can’t find jobs. If they do find jobs, they often don’t pay enough for a young couple to even be able to move into their own apartment.  
So sure, I didn’t like the way I found America when I came back from overseas. But my time abroad did make me realize – at least here we have the freedom to speak out and take action.