Fili’s world

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“A once in a lifetime experience…”, is it not? 1$ or 18000 dong for one opportunity to shoot your favorite gun. You can choose from a variety of Vietnam war weapons, that you’re not likely to see or shoot any other time - a M16, a Mag… And they all lined up for the shot, excited to have their go at the target. Needless to say, none of them were able to hit the American-Guy target at 25m. This is the second time I’ve toured the Vietnam War scenes with the rest of the tourists and every time I felt quite uneasy for a wide variety of reasons.

“Isn’t that the coolest thing?”, “God, these Vietnamese were so smart and simple”, are common phrases that kept running in the background as us tourists visited the Cu Chi underground tunnels and deadly jungle traps. It starts with the movie they show you from back at 1967 made by the communists against the Americans. I could just visualize the Vietnamese people in the movie replaced by the Afgans, the Somalis or the Iraqis in the next version. It also wasn’t hard to take it a step further by replacing the Communism with Allah, Ho Chi Minh with Arafat and the Vietnamese with the Palestinians. Although it may seem that way, this is by no means a political statement, since my left wing ideology is famous, but it does make me wonder why I was the only one making the comparison. Watching the tunnels I was mainly thinking about the tunnels at the Gaza Strip, looking at the death traps I was reflecting of the guerrilla forces fighting Israeli troops in Lebanon. It seems like the whole thing turned into this fun tourist place and no one wants to know or understand what really went on in this place. And it’s not like we don’t have our share of tunnels against the British… I can go on and on about all this, but sufficient to conclude that some nasty things went on here, and most of the time - for nothing… Damn politics… Absolutely nothing.

Aside from the Cu Chi tunnels, the tour also stopped at the weirdest religion’s temple - Cao Dai. They state, themselves, that they are a combination of the 3 big religions blended together in a way that is suppose to leave the good and take out the bad in each. The whole religion was made up at around the beginning of the century with some guy talking to the dead spirits for guidance. Now, I could just visualize the Cao Dai inventor replaced by Moses, maybe Christ or Muchamad, years back, and I bet they seemed as weird to the folks as these Cao Dai seems to me now. But, it’s gaining power, more and more believers everywhere, politics and circumstances pushing them to spread beyond what they’ve ever imagined possible.

Although it may seem that way, and this is by no means a religious statement since my non-religious ideology is famous, it does make me wonder why these religions keep springing up and what is it about religion that sometimes makes people go beyond their own logic and natural actions. At some strange conversation I had back in HoiAn with some Australian-Scottish people I was trying to explain to them what it means to be a religious Jew in Vietnam. They were intrigued, and asked lots of questions. It was hard explaining about the 2 separate sets of dishes and sinks, the 3-5 hours between Dairy and Milk, the rules about what meat and fish should be like and how they should be cooked, the whole ceremony of washing hands and chanting before and after the meal. It was hard, not because there are endless details, or because they wouldn’t understand. It was hard, because after around 2 decades of practicing and learning Jewish life, Buddha-Allah-Yehuva all know that - I, myself - still don’t get the whole thing. This goes beyond the issue of why we need to practice Jewish laws issue and the reasons for the laws. It goes beyond the issue of “is there a god?”. I have respect for people who practice their religion, but I do expect them to have some sort of concrete ideology behind it that goes beyond “It’s tradition” or “God/spirits says so”. I’ve learned to question, to be skeptic and curious about everything - and I’m not expecting to know it all before I do anything. I can go on and on about all this, but sufficient to conclude that all I’m asking is for the people to question things too. Not every men with a vision is God’s entity on earth. To sum things up, here’s a very bad quote (since I don’t quite remember) from a book I don’t really like - “So, do you believe in God?” “I would like to, maybe, but it’s not that simple”.

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