Thursday, December 8, 2011

Meet Laith Salma

Laith Salma is a student on holiday in the US. As a young man from Saudi Arabia, he knows that America has an awful lot of things to offer in terms of experiences and adventures that he can have that he wouldn’t be able to find back home.
America is a land of opportunities. This is a place where people are allowed to bear arms and demonstrate against the government - both at the same time in some cases. This is a place where the greatest experiment in governance by the people is taking place.
It’s truly fascinating. Doubly so considering that America is the last of the great superpowers. Some may say that the time of American hegemony is coming to an end, and perhaps it should. But until that day comes, America remains a fascinating place, somewhere that’s worth seeing.
That is the draw of it to Laith Salma. It’s not that America is the greatest country in the world - not anymore. But it is the freest, the place of the fewest persecutions, the place with the most opportunity. You can study something here, and if you don’t like it, you can switch to something else. This is a place where you can make money just by being famous enough. That is so stupefyingly abnormal that most Americans can barely comprehend it.
It is a land of experimentation. It’s not a land where opportunities are available to everyone, sure, but there are far more of them than what he would find in other countries. He knew that. And that was precisely why he wanted to come here, over anywhere else, to see what he could make of himself.
He’s looking forward to a wild ride. Laith Salma hopes to bring back many stories of what happened to him while he was here.

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