WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE? Part Two

It seems my last post struck a chord with many of you, and I am grateful to you for sharing your varied experiences growing up and/or living here in Kuwait. Some of you have settled here permanently and are genuinely happy, some of you are just getting by until you move back home, some of you come from places that are much harder to live in.. and that's just fine. Every expatriate community around the world has a similar mix of people. And by the way, I apologize for the use of the word "foreigner" a couple of times in the post. I understand now how grating it must feel to read it.

I confess that while this post was brewing in my head for months, what set me off that day was just one single online rant from a couple of expats who hail from one of the most desirable and advanced countries in the world, with one of the highest standards of living anywhere. Their rant was sort of justified, but it got me wondering how and why these people came here in the first place, and why they are putting up with this nonsense. Why don't they move back to their wonderful country where they will be much happier? That's what I'm still curious to find out.

As I said somewhere in the comments, the litany of grievances that I listed were a mixture of my own frustrations and the complaints I hear from some expats. But mainly they are our own legitimate complaints as Kuwaitis, and I mean the Kuwaitis who actually care about what's going on in our country and not the lobotomized consumer zombies trolling the shopping malls day and night, numbed by a constant diet of junk-food and repression.

Kuwaiti is on the edge of an abyss, driven very close to that edge by sheer incompetence, corruption, negligence, short-sightedness and indifference from the very top all the way down. Add to that dismal scenario a toxic mix of sectarianism, fundamentalism and ignorance and is it any wonder we're in the state we're in? There are times when I switch off and simply focus on work, friends and family and not worry myself with what's going on around me. Other times I watch the news from around the world and deliberately ignore news from Kuwait. But inevitably it all creeps back into my life one way or another.

So yes, dear expats, we Kuwaitis have our real worries and grievances too; the biggest of which is that a small wealthy nation like ours is squandering away its future and not living up to its potential. More on that in other post, or you can go through the long archives of old posts because God knows how many times I've said this before!

OFF TOPIC: Since most Kuwaiti bloggers and blog readers have migrated to Twitter (thus illustrating Kuwaitis' notoriously short attention-spans!), I've become less motivated to write long elaborate posts here on Kuwait Unplugged, even though I love writing and I miss it very much. But it seems that it's mainly the Arabic-language (i.e. Kuwaiti) readers who have moved away while the English readers are still here. Is that a correct assessment? There's only one way to find out, people! As I've said many times over the years, it's the interaction with readers that keeps me going so lets see how it goes before I decide to make a full return to blogging :-)

Don't let me down!