Tel Aviv Diary: Karen Alkalay-Gut

Even though I didn’t participate in either of the two May Day parades in the city my heart remains with them. “You cardiac socialist,” the little voice inside me says, “Believing in socialism doesn’t do a single thing for the people.” “Yes,” i answer, “but it got me out of bed this morning.”
Yes, it got me out of bed, and even out to Pappa’s for lunch, where i sat on the balcony far away from the crowd. I don’t have swine flu but why sneeze on people’s pizzas. No-one seemed worried about the media-inspired-swine-flu anyway. We’ve got enough to worry about.
Like the Dead Sea. Why aren’t we working with the Jordanians to dig a canal to the Red Sea so that the Dead Sea doesn’t dry up? I’m sure we could do it without harming the environment if we worked at it. There ARE programs to prevent this like this one: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=5362300.
Of course one of the reasons there is a problem is that we use too much water from the Sea of Galillee and have therefore dammed it up. But maybe we could change. We have been trying to institute some water saving programs in our home – like saving bath/shower water for flushing the toilet. I’d love to get more instructions about this. It’s clear everyone would want to help out if they could.

Let me elaborate on yesterday’s post. Pigs don’t fare well in the major religions here, but the stories behind yesterday’s post are not “religious.” Egypt’s pig raisers are Copts, so there is a political connection to the religious opportunity to destroy pigs. And although the assistant minister of health in Israel was trying to lower the fear rate by ‘neutralizing’ the name, Mexico became insulted by our change of name, so we’re stuck with Swine.