Khalaf Al-Harbi
Okaz
If Bahrain prides itself on being the country of a million palm trees and Mauritania brags about its million poets, Saudi Arabia has the right today to boast about being the country of a million videos.
Thanks to the digital and media revolution of our era, we now see new video clips every day that attest to our weird attitudes. In the few days in which we tried to rid ourselves of the horrors of a video documenting a Daesh (self-proclaimed IS) terrorist slaughtering his cousin, a Saudi wife released a video of her immoral husband cheating on her with the housemaid in the kitchen. Reactions to this video clip confirm that we are a misogynistic society with some people blaming the wife for defaming her husband, while others warned against the dangers of having housemaids. Very little blame was directed at the husband who was the main protagonist.
Then another video of some women fighting in a park went viral. The women flaunted their hitting and kicking skills and seemed adept at fighting, this was especially the case when one of them lifted a chair and threw it at the other woman. The scene reminded me of the old Egyptian actor Farid Shawqi in a film in which he would fight with everyone who visited the coffee shop he was in.
What is funny about this clip is that you can hear the comments of the woman filming the fight. This woman was screaming: “Oh my God” in English, something that showed her non-local softness in the face of this local violence.
Every now and then, new videos are released of young men joyriding and drifting, men attending parties where food is served in abundance with most of it going to waste, poets who do not practice what they preach, etc.
I don’t really know whether what is happening in our society today is normal. Our community is changing fast, but these changes do not seem to be in the right direction. I’m not even sure in which direction we are heading. It feels like we are circling around a fixed point. The fast pace of these challenges is beyond our capacity or the ability of the iPhone that is being used to capture these videos to document the weird state that we are in.
