Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Skateboarding in Gaza

Yair Lapid, an Israeli celebrity type who has a regular column on YNet and hosts a prime time television talk show, features a Gaza child-blogger in today's Internet column. Well worth a read.

The child blogger, a skateboard enthusiast, muses over his board fashioned of scrap metal left over from Quassam rockets. He also comments on the quick getaway it provides when fleeing "long ones" although, he says, everyone knows there's nowhere to hide.

The writing is a disturbing mix of child norms - attempting skateboarder tricks, idolizing and obsessing over heroes - and the realities of war - classmates' deaths caused by "long one" hits -that no child should endure.

When writing about attempting to get onto university computers for updates vis a vis the skateboarding world at large, he notes:

I have learned that during times like this when there is nothing to eat and people are dying all the time, it is preferable not even to try because there will always be someone who will get angry at me.

Before Suleiman died, he would say that this is one of the crazy things about living in Gaza: The angrier they get about children that are killed, the worse they behave towards children who are alive.

Go read. It's a reality check.

2 comments:

Liza said...

Thanks for the heads up on the Yair Lapid article. The comments, of course, are predictably pathetic, but the piece itself was very good. It reminded me of children in poorer neighborhoods in the US who use sports as their ticket out.

Stefanella said...

I notice commentors claim the blog is a Lapid mock-up. I wondered the same when reading. Fiction or not, the message remains