Early Morning Rage

my morning got off to a rousing start when i checked my email.  allie is in dubai right now visiting robin and sent one of those innocuous emails just saying that she got there ok and pointed out some of the more glaring differences between our two countries.  her last point was about something i already knew, but had forgotten.

 

apparently they have, in a most literal sense, wiped israel off the map.  it just doesn't exist.  and robin, as a teacher in an american school, is not allowed to talk about israel to her students.  this got me riled up on my way to work this morning.

 

i find the conceptual elimination of a whole country (a country full of "the enemy" mind you) to be counter-productive.  i narrowed this down to two ways to look at the situation, both resulting in the same conclusion. 

 

the first is that if you actively detest something, and want to indoctrinate children to feel the same, doesn't it make sense to actively hold it up as an example of pure evil?  tough to do if you can neither hear nor speak of it. 

 

the second option is that you don't, in fact, want to indoctrinate the children, you don't want to talk about it, you just want the whole thing to be a non-issue.  then why not just leave israel on the map and not talk about it?  i grew up in a school that was chock full of maps, with all the countries, and i never gave a rats about any of them unless a teach drew our attention to the relevant area.

 

and i know the practice of redrawing boundaries is not necessarily uncommon but i find the whole thing annoying.  stop living in a dreamworld of magic and just deal with whatever issues you have. 

 

i was trying to relate the whole thing to my own personal sentiments and all i could come up with was drawing a map of the world that eliminated switzerland.  i don't like switzerland; i find it to be the creepy uncle of europe.  its like the european union invited everyone to a party and switzerland RSVP'd no, but showed up anyway and just stood in a corner lurking.  seedy underbelly.

 

but i would never advocate for the elimination of switzerland from my maps.  and not just because the hole in the middle of europe would be hard to explain, or because its not my place to divide and allocate the land to switzerland's neighbours, but because it does not, fundamentally, make sense to pretend your enemies don't exist.