WestMeetsEast

It’s true what they say about living abroad – that you often end up learning more about your own culture than your adopted country's. Either that, or as Americans we are just self-absorbed. In any case, this week, as we found out we are having a boy, my husband and I have been reflecting on Americanisms, good and bad, and whether by default our child will inherit them, being more than 7,000 miles away. In other words, which traits are personal, which are cultural and as parents, which ones do we inevitably pass along?

One of the sad conclusions I have come to about the UAE is that it will never feel like home. Not even temporarily. The fact of the matter is, foreigners are not encouraged to make Dubai home. The benevolent dictatorship is simply set up to extract what it can from us and then send us back home. I met a very interesting Indian woman who heads up a media agency here who says she feels as much a stranger as she did the day she landed in Dubai 25 years ago.

The reasons are these: When you pay no taxes, you have no say-so. When you cannot elect someone to represent your concerns, you have no stake. When roads and parks and hospitals are built, you happily accept what has been provided. You do not question. You are not ungrateful. You make concessions because you have no right not to.

What manifests from this is a society that doesn’t care, a culture with no sense of community, no collective. No one gathers to voice concerns because who would listen? In a country where 85 percent of the people are not citizens, we are simply guests. And what guest doesn’t steal a towel or a jar of shampoo on his way out?

One of the best assets of the Arab world has always been its low-crime communities. Random acts of violence against strangers – in general – don’t happen here like they do in the US. There is violence of course, but it’s typically crimes of passion as they say, revenge against someone who’s wronged you.

But when you purposely create a city full of transients who are reminded of their low worth virtually every day – by obscene rental increases; by acts of racism perpetrated by nightclubs, restaurants and co-workers; by abusive bosses who keep passports and sack and deport people on a whim; by restricting access to the Internet and censoring films – there are other crimes that come into play.

These kinds of crimes are subtle and ultimately demoralizing. They take form in acts of daily road rage; hit-and-run accidents; companies withholding salaries; smoking next to gasoline pumps; allowing children to swim in pools with no lifeguards (and drowning); lax safety standards that lead to senseless deaths like the girl thrown from a three-wheeler while impotent security guards stood by or the boy dropped from the sky out of the shoddy hang glider; laborer suicides; taxi drivers blowing themselves up because their employers won’t let them visit home; expat women gang raped by privileged citizens who are let go scot-free by their own courts….These are just examples I have personally witnessed in the last two years.

They may seem tame in comparison with the level of crime in the US – but the difference here is that there is no recourse. These crimes go unpunished because of the reasons stated above. We are not citizens, and therefore ultimately and utterly helpless to affect change.

This, in the end, is the real reason why democracies should be created and promoted. Without democracies, when average people have no stake in their communities, no judicial system to fall back on, there is little incentive to be decent.

Back to what I have learned about Americans. It’s simple; it’s even silly. But it’s true: We are optimists. Even my husband and I – cynical journalists to the core – are optimists deep down. Our culture teaches its citizens not only that they can do better, but that they should do better. Thus we have a country – in a very flawed way perhaps – that is a true work in progress. But the sentiment, the underlying goal, is one of decency. Whether we get there in my son’s lifetime remains to be seen. We can only hope that decency, at least, is one trait he'll pick up along the way.