Reforming Reform

The past few days have been hectic to say the least. Name calling, stone throwing, pledging allegiance, re-pledging allegiance, and so on. Throw in a few car rallies, shooting weapons in the air and of course waving swords and you can easily be inclined to think that all hell is going to break loose! On the other hand, and to give credit where credit is due, I would like to express how proud I am with the level of intelligence and foresight I see amongst fellow reformers and non-reformers, especially the ones intelligent enough to use Twitter and to a less extent Facebook.

I am really torn in two. When I read the twitter reform page #ReformJO I have belief that a state as small and quiet as Jordan can actually do the world, or at least itself, some good. I wish I could say the same when im casually driving through the streets though, or checking some friends Facebook statuses. We live in country with a large amount of diversity, in a country with so much of closed social circle that its hard to add a random Jordanian without finding out we share a mutual friend or two. This diversity could be interpreted as a strength or as a weakness, I guess it depends on its utilization. As for the close social circle, this aspect cannot, to my mind, be anything but a plus. This makes the spread of a message easy, and the share of a thought an ease.

Now to diagnose a critical, yet not so critical, situation on the national front. We are faced today with a challenge; to keep our solidarity, figure out our national identity and then to live with it. No political reform can come without stepping up and making our voices heard, and to step up, of recent, may mean to get hit by a rouge stone or two. Our political reform needs to be clear and our agenda (I use the word in limited context) and make it clear what we want, and when we want it.

I have never been a big fan of conspiracies, and hearing of an Israeli conspiracy to turn Jordan into some kind of scape goat for a larger scheme barely intrigues me, but I am clear on one thing, and that is political reform cant do us any bad, may it be to save us from earthly plots, get us better jobs or even just make our electricity bill easier to digest. The fact of the matter is that political reform is a must. I want it, the people must want it and the king seemingly does too, so why isn't it happening?

The right of free speech is, to me, sacred (again, a word i'm not a huge fan of, for its relations to theism, but thats not of relevance right now) and by sacred I mean essential, one I would fight for, one I could say I might even die for, even though dying isn't up there on my personal list, not for now at least. And from what I've seen, we are going in the right direction, at least when it comes to freedom of speech, and thats a pointer in the right direction.

On the 25th of March the nation suffered a step backwards .. but two days later I can say that we have regained our ground and even took a step forward. Some of what I see around me keeps me from being optimistic, but in general I don't think it can stop me from saying that, as long as we have enough freethinking people as I know we do, we are heading in generally the right direction.