reflection week five

Friday night, a few friends and I (including Supriya, as she also briefly writes about this topic) went to see the movie, The Kingdom, which was, by the way, most excellent; I recommend that you all see it. Anyways, after a civilian shooting and bombing in an American housing compound in Saudi Arabia, an FBI team goes in to catch and prosecute the terrorists who performed such violent acts.

What I found most interesting about this movie was how it related back to our discussion on Tuesday. Though this may be stretching it slightly, I saw the Americans, the minority, as "aliens" in Saudi Arabia, while the Saudis dealt with them as they would. The three options that we gave in class as to how to react to aliens landing on the white house lawn were (1) assimilation, (2) kill or be killed, and (3) diplomacy.

Initially, the Americans tried to live in peace on Saudi soil - there was a diplomatic agreement that they would be safe. After the bombing, it turned into a "kill or be killed" situation in which both cultures viewed the other as the enemy, while in actuality, only a select few were a part of the terrorist group who should be condemned. The FBI entering the country did not help this situation as, at least initially, the Saudi government was incredibly hostile and not willing to negotiate with them in any way.

Yet, isn't that how we said that we would act if aliens appeared in Washington? We discussed that we would make sure they could not cause harm (it seems that we're a bunch of realists then, always concerned with security and such) before making sure to keep them out of the public eye for fear of chaos and panic. The Saudis, in the movie, provided the FBI agents with a secure location to stay in and kept them within the compound and out of the public eye. It is as if the agents were in fact aliens.

To pop out of the movie discussion, I would just like to say that despite what others may say, I thought that the snake discussion that we had Tuesday provided a good way to get everyone talking. However, it did not allow for rebuttal and those speaking at the end of the chain were often forced to speak on a comment to which they had no specific responese.

On the other hand, I thought that Friday's discussion went quite well. Though there were several instances in which people felt the need to "go back" in the discussion rather than just connecting their previous point to whatever was currently on topic (if such a thing is not possible, then the point is not very versitile and probably not completely necessary), overall, I thought that we connected ideas and deepened the discussion quite well. Can't wait to see how discussions this week proceed!