London Free Press

Birthing a country is one thing. Stopping a three-week-old from crying is another.

Out of the country since last fall, it's been an experience for me to return and see what's up here these days. Mad cow, West Nile, SARS. It's all so dizzying.

Just when the Yankee cat turns its back to focus on Iraq, the Yemeni mice go out to play. A gang of al-Qaeda-type jailbirds, including two held as key suspects in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, have apparently vanished from a jail in Aden for good.

One of the things I've discovered as a part-time resident of the Middle East is how easily things such as cultural nuances can hide in plain view.

If truth is the first casualty of war, one has to wonder what that does in the socalled battle over hearts and minds of people, not only in Iraq, but across the Arab world and beyond.

Listen to the words of a cargo handler at London's airport, spoken while he cleared freight I shipped to Yemen last year: "Those people are backwards and they don't want to change. As far as I'm concerned, I couldn't care less what happens to them."

Chalk up a victory for misguided tolerance in the recent flap with Lebanon's ambassador to Canada, Raymond Baaklini.

It didn't take long for what started out like a normal day in our household to turn into the day from hell.

Life in Yemen is different. Still, a colleague surprised me not long ago when I invited some boys from the office for an afternoon getaway at a local recreation centre.

The children. Oh, the children. The smallest hold tightly onto black, tent-like baltos that drape over their mothers. Others sing in a school courtyard near our home. But the beggar kids who run to our vehicle when it's stopped at intersections really get me.

I have an Arab friend who looks very much like a stereotypical western mobster. A gentle spirit, he also reminds me of a boy named Michael, son of Mike Sr., a gangster in the recent Tom Hanks film, The Road to Perdition.

There comes a time in the life of every person and nation to decide, in the struggle between truth and lies, if they will choose to stand on the side of good or evil -- this was the case put by English writer James Russell Lowell 150 years ago. You'd think he was writing about contemporary Yemen.

Among the more comical responses to the tragic attacks of Sept. 11 was from an American who said she would pile up her credit card charges to beat the terrorists, "Just to show I have faith in the economy."

If you can read this, congratulations -- you're better educated than two billion people.

(The London Free Press – Oct. 28, 2000) ST. THOMAS, CANADA – Is the human soul just a vast bundle of nerve cells? Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate who set modern biotechnology in motion when he discovered DNA a generation ago, says yes. In The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For The Soul, he suggests our joys and sorrows, memories and ambitions, personal identities and even our cherished notions of free will are nothing more than the biochemical reactions of a neural machine. Brilliant as Crick is, the idea is more hollow than astonishing. It was the poet William Blake who said scientists, in trying to decipher that which should remain indecipherable, would "turn that which is soul and life into a mill or machine."