Early last year I began to suffer from a severe stomach-ache, few months later I was diagnosed for cancer.
Confronted with my own mortality, I began to lament myself for all the things I had not accomplished yet with my life.

Yes, it’s true, I had traveled very much, met a lot of fantastic peoples, slept with many gorgeous females (one at the time ,of course !) etc... But I had never seen the world trade cen... oh ! That’s no more. well... The statue of liberty in new York nor sahit el-fnaa in Marrakech, never spent a journey wandering aimlessly along the great wall of china, never scaled, much less being near, mount Everest, never had a face to face encounter with a wild beast during my “promenades” in the forest, never dived in the red see, never been to the south or north poles.

Thirty-something years old and “dangerously” approaching [at the speed of light] forty, I had let my life slip away from me and was now forced to admit to myself how poorly I had prepared myself for death. As soon as I heard the verdict I started to go to gyms, just because I was going to meet my maker didn’t mean it was too late to get myself back into fighting trim. Besides, I wanted to look sharp at my funeral. At the same time I started reading Ibn Khaldoun, Montaigne and Al-Farabi, I didn’t want to leave this world without having finished that internal reading list !

Months later, immensely relieved after a successful surgical operation, I dropped fitness training from my agenda and put back the heavy boys back on the bookshelf. Yet despite the positive end of my trauma, my brush with death left me deeply troubled, it brought me face to face with my most guarded values and had “discovered” a number of troublesome inadequacies. I was no longer regretting all the things I had yet to accomplish during my brief sojourn on mother earth : learning Chinese, to wander around for a few hours in the Karnak temple, to oust Slim Chiboub from the leadership of L`ESPERANCE and take his place, to take part in the Rio carnival at least once in a lifetime (my hajj !), to visit every borde... no. Instead, I was realizing how revoltingly self-centered my reaction to the specter of death has been, I’ve discovered how selfish person I was. I was rapidly coming to terms with the fact that, despite the friendly façade of charm that masqueraded as a personality I felt worthless.

Yet in my defense I realized that I was not the only member of my age group who would have reacted in this way, I was simply being true to the ethos of my generation. Now I had to face that ugly truth not only about me but about us.

THE HORRID TRUTH ABOUT MY GENERATION

As a prototypical product of generation X I take upon myself this burdensome task to tell the truth about us. We had a good start with the food riots of 84 and the subsequent departure of the much hated Mzali, change was in the air as they say fill bled. but then we hit the wall. We became self-absorbed. We stopped caring about but money and food. We fell in love with our mobile phones. Some obsessed about Italian footwear other about the right to wear culturally correct Egyptian peasant dresses and acted like they were on to something !

We abandoned the poor, the have-nots, the nobodies, the oppressed because we were doing a post-doctoral work or busy making money, always acting like we were better then the rest... We made stars of Lamine Nehdi, Lotfi Bouchnak, Sofia Sadek, and heroes of Saddam, Ben Laden. We made millionaires out of nobodies (Trabelsi & co) just by looking away pretending not to be involved. And all along we were acting as if we were really cool.

So deceptive.

To be continued...