At our international airport, the small booth for selling books was transformed into a booth to sell confectionary, except for one shelf where some books still stood. This is a story telling us the horrible situation of our education system. There is no problem in changing the bookstore into a candy store. Who is going to continue selling goods that have no customers?
Minute details at airports influence the first impressions of people visiting the Kingdom. They will see flabby figures and obese physiques and then turn right to see a queue of people lining up to buy chocolate from the candy store. The worst thing about obesity is that fat is not usually equally distributed in a person’s body. Fat bloats the human body from neck to toe leaving the brain smaller and shallower. If the brain was to grow big then one would have grown addicted to reading.
I have known this bookstore since I first became acquainted with the airport terminal years ago. With every new flight, I see people resisting temptations to munch.
With every new flight, a new bookshelf disappears, which is soon replaced with a new brand of candy. I believe the last standing shelf will also soon disappear. It is the new culture of munching. Yesterday night I tried to kill some time by reading. I started looking through the last shelf at the candy store and this is what I saw. The shelf contained books relating to legends, myths and conspiracies. Titles included: The Legitimacy of Witchcraft and Sorcerers, Natural Herbal Remedies, There’s a Giant in Our House, Your Spiritual Life Without a Doctor, One Hundred Questions About Marital Life and the list goes on.
Then I remembered a quote by the famous French thinker Gustave Le Bon: “Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.”
Then I went further to the left side of the shelf to find translated books with titles that reflect a culture of hatred and fear of all religions, cultures, communities and organizations apart from ours. The titles were full of conspiracies as if all of the world’s communities and organizations have nothing better to do but discuss us.
I continued to flip through the books. The book titles on the airport bookstore shelf show that although we are fighting Al-Qaeda in a raging war, we are still allowing its stream of thought to be available to passengers and travelers.
Who is responsible for the sale of these types of books? It is a culture that has been programmed to forcefully influence all individuals and their way of thinking with one concept. Anything that negates this concept is forbidden and prohibited. I express my gratitude to the culture of legends, myths and conspiracies!
