Danes in Denmark

I have now been home in Denmark for two days. Anyway, today I would like to share an experience i have had.

Currently, I am visiting my parents. We're leaving for Port du Soleil tomorrow, until then, I am alone in their house, doing all the stuff I have not had the time to du while being in Egypt and which I will not be able to do while skiing. So, I was working on a kinds of tasks, and suddenly, in comes the plummer. Apparently, my parents had forgot to tell that he would drop by. That is not unheard of in my family, but being a member of this family you quickly learn to take things as they come. So, I started chatting with the man about the royal family, business, and yes, Egypt.

When two men meet, they start a most interesting dance. It is highly ritualized, yet very dynamic and potent. The two men take turns in telling about their own or their loved one's lives. The other nots at the right times, hinting that the subject might not be the common denominator. The dance continuous until a subject is found, which satisfies both men. If it is difficult to find a subject, it is always easy to resolve the situation, by talking about the whether or politics - these are basically the themes that everybody can talk about in the same way, as they all have the same experiences.

My chat with the plummer came to the whether-or-politics moment - we chose politics of cause, and as I had just been to Egypt, the Muhammad Crisis was an obvious choice of theme. Do you know the way people say things, when they expect a nod and a 'yes' from the other part in the discussion? Sure you do. In this discussion, things turned out a little differently. The plummer said that 'the Arabs are from a totally different world'. I have tried Cairo's traffic, so I do not disagree completely, but of cause, the sentence was pregnant with meaning, which can only be interpreted by the ear trained in the idiosyncrasies of the local culture. Here's a translation: "the Arabs are from a totally different world" = "I do not understand the arabs, they speak another language, have a different religion, are probably very irrational - and they are probably all the same".

What is a man to do, when talking with a man with such views? I will tell you what I did.

I chose to tell him, how the boycott of Danish products may not have been a good thing, but at the same time i said that a boycott is not the act of a villain, but the act of a person who try to explain that the person does not consent with the behavior of other people and at the same time choses to use peaceful means to send a signal. A boycott is not a thing which is only used outside the Western civilization, it is the very symbol of civilization. Where there are boycotts, there is peace. Basically, I gave him another perspective and emphasized that the people I have met in Egypt are not all the same - they are in fact as different as him and me.

What would you have said?

/JJ