On 23 August 1990 President Saddam appeared on state television with Western hostages to whom he had refused exit visas. In the video, he patted a small British boy named Stuart Lockwood on the back. Saddam then asks, through his interpreter, Sadoun al-Zubaydi, whether Stuart is getting his milk. Saddam went on to say, “We hope your presence as guests here will not be for too long. Your presence here, and in other places, is meant to prevent the scourge of war.”

— Wikipedia entry on The Gulf War

What would my father have said and done had Saddam Hussein walked into his makeshift prison cell and spoken with him? Would he have been diplomatic in order to keep himself alive or gone down kicking and screaming? I still often think about what our lives would be like had Dad not escaped almost thirty days after being taken hostage in Kuwait’s international airport in the early morning hours of August 2nd, 1990. Or had he been fatally shot the time he was mugged after his escape, during his turn patrolling our home’s compound. Or had he never made it out of Jordan or Iraq on his way to India, to my mother and me.

Somebody has to tell my father’s story. Many have tried  – the countless interviews and his countless retellings – and failed. You really don’t get it all unless you were there. And it’s not your story or that of Dave Eggers. It’s not even my story, for that matter, even if I figure into it. My teenage brain was a sponge; I remember everything from the months Dad was gone, and every last thing he narrated once he was returned to us. But it’s not for this blog, not today. Just know that if there was anyone all of this should not have happened to, it is my father. No one should be taken hostage and made to undergo the humiliation, uncertainty, and terror of capture at gunpoint, escape, robbery at gunpoint, leaving your home behind, and a greater journey to physical freedom, but not this sweet man. He who can make gardens grow from deserts, music out of thin air, and light of any situation. Then again, maybe he was the right person for the circumstances, for times out of our control. My mother and I would have died or, more accurately, gotten ourselves killed. Dad escaped. It’s Mom and I who hold a grudge to this day. Dad left it behind. And still would, if we’d only let him.

We cannot let him forget. When he forgets, who are we to remember? And when we forget, we forgive, trust, drop our guard, and make the same mistakes all over again. The memories are the scab that protect and remind.

***

Today, twenty years ago, made sure I would never see Kuwait again. First, they took my father and luck showed him out. Then they took all of our belongings, as my mother reported from her April 1991 visit back. The neighbors who sold many of our things thinking my father would never return, looters who made off with other belongings from as heavy as a piano to as light as a teddybear, a government that made sure any last remaining shred of dignity would not be given. What could the thieves possibly want with all of mom’s saris? What did they do with photo reels from our family vacations? How long did it take them to rip up the wall-to-wall carpeting? How dumb was spray painting Long Live Saddam Hussein in Arabic on a bedroom door in the recesses of an expatriate’s dwelling? Wouldn’t it make more sense to make that statement on an outer wall, you numbwits? Why did those of you who were supposed to help shirk your responsibility, and you who didn’t have to give a damn come to our aid?

They took everything, including my desire to return. One would think the events of 1990-91 taught the Kuwaiti people a thing or two. But just as 9/11, Katrina and The Flood, and now the Oil Spill have imparted to Americans nothing about humility, real values, and our place and worth in this world, a violent invasion and bloody war were not enough to dampen the sheer hubris of a bunch of oil-rich illiterates posing as leaders. They abdicated their duty to their nation in its greatest hour of need and haven’t changed a bit since. If all that wealth cannot save your citizens beyond no income tax and free healthcare, honor foreigners who gave the best years of their lives to your country, and make you more human, screw you.

It’s bad enough that, each time we return from a trip abroad, my brother and I have to explain to American immigration why our passports say we were born in Kuwait City, as if that makes us some goddamned terrorists. What would they do if I were to simply respond, “My parents lived and worked there at the time and had my mom known how much trouble this was going to be, she’d have popped me out in the USA but them’s the breaks, so can I go now?” That’s enough Kuwait for one lifetime, thanks.

***

The memories are the scab that protect and remind.

My 1980s were spent begging my parents to leave Kuwait to return to America. Let’s just go. No, American schools are of low quality, you need to finish out your high school education here and us our careers. Be loyal, see it through to the end, start and finish in nice round numbers. Humans are funny, aren’t we? We think we control life and deem it fair by labeling portions of it with terms such as “beginning,” “end,” “dedication,” and “reward.” I am no fool – I thought of 1990 and everything we lost when packing all of my papers, photographs, and heirlooms into the car and made my way out of New Orleans on August 28th, 2005. Humans are really hilarious, aren’t we? We think we have all our physical and emotional bases covered. Instead I had fallen in love with a city that flooded when it was slated to be hit by a hurricane, that I returned to, and then left when other responsibilities called. Life happens, things change, the past has passed, and the future is uncertain, so what remains to protect and be reminded of?

That: Our money and things ought to help us but not define us, not the other way around. We cannot choose our family, but we can choose our friends. There are some people, places, and things worth saving, and others to avoid at all costs. Reality means we cannot keep or keep from all of the time. Love and hate are normal, but we can’t let these emotions consume us, or who will be left to dish out love and hate? Time is our greatest ally and our worst enemy – it takes us away but it takes us … away. All of us, every single day, understandably and undeniably wage a monstrous battle in that space between who and where we want to be and who and where we indeed are, and that we switch sides so often in this battle to alternately live and stay alive. This, in the end, is the paradox of being human.

That this is being human, and these lessons are not lived easily even if we know them to be true.

My mother and I fight the world constantly, while my father accepts it as best he can. This has been our Gulf War for the last twenty years.

Stop. Time for a thought check.

Ever since the 2007 presidential campaign, I’ve noticed that “Muslim” has become an increasingly bad word all over this country. Somewhere along the way, the object of ire changed from “Islamic fundamentalists” and “Arab terrorists” to straight out “Muslims.” This switcheroo has not occurred just in the vernacular of the usual unthinking dumbasses you would expect to say such things, but also in the online and real-life conversations of otherwise rational people. Even some scientists and atheists these days seem to take Muslims as well as fundamentalist Muslims to task quicker than fundamentalists of other religions, when all fundamentalism is essentially the same.

This has two very dangerous repercussions:

1) American Muslims, just like there are American Christians, American Hindus, American Buddhists, etc. Anyone ever think about this large chunk of the voting populace? A lot of them are educated, moneyed, business owners and law-abiding, productive people. Above all, they are Americans. Just like you and me, no more, no less. What does denigrating their religious identity accomplish other than alienation and putting them in harm’s way?

Furthermore, we have partnered with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, other Arab countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan in this War On Terror. Walking arm in arm with Prince Abdullah and enlisting the support of Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai while “taking democracy to the poor Muslims of Iraq and Afghanistan” and then turning around to vilify Muslims wholesale is a special kind of cognitive dissonance. Forget American exceptionalism and stewardship, upholding religious freedom, and all those nice things our kids are blown up for, and ask this: How does it help our allies and our enemies take us seriously?

2) The more crucial, insidious reason to consciously avoid this kind of speech: Verbalizing “Muslims” as the enemy immediately places our domestic and foreign policy discussions in a religious context. Once there is a worse religion, there is automatically a better religion. Equate America and this better religion and you are well on the way to establishment, hastened only by the lazy, latent acceptance of those not particularly religious in any direction. I cannot stress and warn against this enough.

If Muslim fundamentalists hate us for our freedom, let’s give them real freedom of thought and practice to hate, and not some medieval god-loaded hypocrisy that rolls as Americanism these days. Think.

P.S. I closed comments on this post and this post alone on purpose. It keeps some, especially those who have never before commented here, from jerking their knees. You know where to find me if you really want to talk about it.

Christian Science Monitor | From ‘static kill’ to ‘bottom kill“: next steps in Gulf oil spill – best explanation of the Static Kill followed by Bottom Kill methodology I’ve seen yet.

[Bottom kill] will come after static kill, which has a tentative start date of next Monday. Static kill would deposit the same mixture of materials into the top of the well. Unlike top kill in late May, which employed the same tactic, static kill is considered a more realistic solution to preventing oil flow because the container cap, installed in mid-July, is providing a tighter seal around the wellhead and therefore won’t allow oil and gas to escape.

And why things have seemingly slowed down over the last couple of weeks.

Both operations are being prepared simultaneously. Monday the well lines are being reattached to the riser pipes that extend from the seafloor to near the surface, after they were temporarily abandoned this weekend due to the threat of tropical storm Bonnie. Both lines will be flushed to remove sediments.

Starting Wednesday and continuing through Sunday, the lines will each be fitted with a 2,000-foot internal casing pipe that will carry the materials downward. Once they are in place, the static kill operation will occur, likely Monday. The entire endeavor is set to prepare the launch of the relief well operation.

“The week after next we will have the potential to begin killing the well.”

Did anyone hear Jon Stewart saying last night that Tony Hayward started at BP as a geologist at the age of 22 and with a PhD? Ah, that famous one-year University of Edinburgh PhD. Ok, it turns out he was 25. Either way, it’s the first I heard he started out in the industry as a production geologist before “rising quickly through the ranks in a series of technical and commercial roles in BP Exploration” and “coming to Lord ‘Culture of Complacency’ Browne‘s attention.” The shame.

In other news, a plan to kill an American geologist with poisoned beer. The terrorists know our weakness.

As a geo-technologist, I’m always thinking about information generation and reliability, open access, and the relevance of (lower and) higher education today. Through all this, I also ponder the changing nature of education and jobs, more specifically how we learn and how we work, given the changing nature of information. Here are a few interesting reads.

Harvard Magazine | Gutenberg 2.0

… [Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School] sees similar problems when making the rounds with medical students, fellows, and residents: When we run into a problematic complex patient with a clearly genetic problem from birth, and I ask what the problem might be and what tests are to be ordered, their reflex is either to search their memories for what they learned in medical school or to look at a textbook that might be relevant. They don’t have what I would characterize as the ˜Google reflex,“ which is to go to the right databases to look things up. The students doubtless use Google elsewhere in their lives, but in medicine, he explains, the whole idea of just-in-time learning and using these websites is not reflexive. That is highly troublesome because the time when you could keep up even with a subspecialty like pediatric neurosurgery by reading a couple of journals is long, long gone.

I wish universities had general science informatics graduate programs, and not just bioinformatics ones. Do they? Then again, does one even need formal certification in “science informatics” when what is required beyond the requisite science degree(s) is a natural DIY inclination to search for information? How To Mine Online Resources can be a learned skill and net savvy certainly isn’t some genetic-nerd quality, but whither the reflex?

A comprehensive report on Open Access by the United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee:

The increased impact of wider access to academic research papers could be worth approximately £170 million per year to the UK economy.

Although we believe that publicly funded research should be available to everyone, it is not a straightforward journey and our role is to involve and work with colleges and universities to help them to make the choices that are right for their individual situation … The long term goal is to achieve a coherent layer of open scholarly and academic resources readily available to all on the internet.

Anya Kamenetz and I met years ago in New Orleans when she interviewed me on post-K recovery for the Village Voice. She has now penned the timely and insightful DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. From the book:

1. The promise of free or marginal-cost open-source content, techno-hybridization, unbundling of educational functions, and learner-centered educational experiences and paths is too powerful to ignore. These changes are inevitable. They are happening now …

2. However, these changes will not automatically become pervasive. Many existing institutions, especially those with the greatest reserves of wealth and reputation, will manage to remain outwardly, physically the same for decades, and to charge ever-higher tuition, even as enrollment shifts more and more toward the for-profits and community colleges and other places that adopt these changes.

3. In order to short-circuit the cost spiral, and provide access to appropriate education and training for people of all backgrounds, there is much hard work to be done in the way schools are funded and accreditation and transfer policies are set. College leaders need to have the will to change … political leaders need to legislate change … Above all, learners and their families need to recognize that alternatives to the status quo exist and demand change.

4. The one thing that can change dramatically and relatively swiftly is the public perception of where the true value and quality of higher education lies. It’s no longer about the automatic four-year degree for all. Institutions can’t rely any more on history, reputation, exclusivity, and cost; we now have the ability to peer inside the classroom … So we have both the ability and the obligation to look at demonstrated results.

Change comes from imagination, moving away from the herd mentality and questioning how a traditional college education will serve one’s ambitions for the future. This is why I don’ t have a college degree in computer science; no way good money would be wasted on something I could teach myself. It was my interest in geology, which requires laboratory facilities and access to field education, that motivated and propelled me through what is otherwise a factory conveyor belt*. I’m really interested in science access being made open further through the creation of co-learning spaces (like co-working and co-tech spaces) and, in this day and age of the Maker Faire, public maker laboratories with teachers. Or is this where universities with these facilities can re-establish their relevance and open their doors to learners wanting shorter-term contracts?

That’s it for now.

* The stadium classes, the use of precious laboratory and discussion time to re-learn and re-teach what the professor crammed into the 50-minute lecture, tutoring your fellow students after class because your teaching assistant has mentally checked out, finally caving into student demands of “Is this going to be on the test?” only to find out that they can’t reproduce an answer if it stared them in the face and the terminal humiliation of the grading curve. And they wonder why we have a creativity crisis.