Almost 5 months, time to blog...

I'm sure I have something at least mildly interesting to say after having been here for almost 5 months now, but the main goal for this post, is itself. I'm trying to break the inertia that has kept me from blogging regularly... ok, at all, since I've been here.

I can hear a small protest going on in front of the US embassy (the language institute where I work is just down the road). It's middle of the day here, and the current gathering is the third in about a week. These shows of defiance against the evil enemy are government orchestrated and given the resources backing them kind of pathetic. I guess I should be happy that the people here are able to freely express themselves, even if it's only when your message furthers the current regimes' objectives... right?

As I have been communicating to some family and friends, my life here has been little altered by recent events. I live in a quiet community and not too far from work (where I also meet my Arabic tutor for lessons). The past couple of weeks have seen a slight up-tick in activity in Damascus itself, but most of the noise continues to take place in cities far from the capital and in a few suburbs around the capital.

From talking with folks both Syrian and ex-pats, the opinions of where this situation may go are no too varied. They range from an Iraqi style civil war to a bloody crackdown by the regime, balanced with enough normality so as to bury the underlying social/political fissures for at least another few years.

I originally thought that only about 10% of the population supported the government and that the remainder were against, with a split between those willing to risk their lives to express themselves and those who would sit back and hope their more defiant counterparts would succeed. However, I had an interesting conversation with a student of mine last night. Like most students here he is fairly liberal and well educated. He commented that, while he recognizes the shortcomings in the current system, that people going out into the streets and yelling and at times shooting (I have a feeling he believes that there is more shooting from the anti-government side, than I do) is not the right way forward and that calmer heads need to prevail. This may be an allusion to the "civil war" scenario, or may be his own feelings that despite its deficiencies, the Al-Assad regime isn't that bad and must be given an chance to reform over time. This conversation has made me begin to rethink my hypothesized distribution of political attitudes across the Syria citizenry. It has also made me wonder about the possible frustration that those more defiant elements of the country must feel when faced with opposition from folks who agree with them in long-term vision, but perhaps not in terms of how to get there, or who may not feel the same urgency to act.