I start almost every day with a cold shower – but it’s not what you think.
A nice cold shower wakes me up. Well, it’s either the shower or my daily Starbucks grande-espresso-double-shot-on-ice-with-energy. Either way, I see the shower as a necessity. So the other day, like most mornings, I stripped down, wrapped a towel around my waist and headed straight for the shower – only to be stopped by an excessively abrupt “And where do you think you’re going?” from my mom.
Yes, I’m living at home this summer, and with that comes an automatic awareness of what’s going on in the world. My dad is a journalist and my mom is a CNN news junkie. While my alarm wakes me to the tune of “Beautiful Day” by U2, my parents’ internal alarm wakes them every day before 5 a.m. and instills in them the uncontrollable lust for coverage of the Washington area’s top local news stories.
This particular morning, WTOP was advising Montgomery County residents to boil water before using it. It wasn’t all that clear whether this only applied to drinking water, or to showers, as well. Consequently, if I wanted to shower, my mom said, I would have to boil the water first.
This inconvenience resulted from a 36-inch water main burst the night before that left some homes and businesses north of the Capital Beltway with little to no water pressure. The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission issued the advisory because lower pressure increases the risk of contamination.
The reason this hit home was because lately I’ve been feeling that most of our shared problems as Americans are internal. Whether it’s a rise in gas prices, a decision to invade other countries, a flood, a collapsed bridge, a hurricane or a broken water main, it all seems to go down within our country.
That’s not to say other countries don’t have local and internal problems or that we have no problems that arise from foreign sources. It’s just that having spent most of my life in Great Britain and Israel, inconveniences always seem to have come from outside.
Because of the nature of the European Union, Britain’s laws are largely influenced by neighboring countries. Geographically, it’s also closer to Africa and Asia. But given America’s power, it cannot help but also affect England. American issues are widely discussed.
The war in Iraq sparked extensive conversation among my friends about Britain’s responsibility – or lack of it – when it joined America in Iraq. American issues permeate day-to-day life in Britain. The recent Writers Guild of America strike strongly affected television viewership in Britain because many of the top television programs came from Hollywood.
In Israel, I felt similar vibes. I was never in complete control of my life. As a kid, my parents stopped me from riding buses and even imposed restrictions on the places I could go for fear of bombings by Islamist militant groups. I had a classmate whose father was killed in an attack on the 18 bus my dad normally rode to work in Jerusalem.
I remember when a stone drinking fountain was built in my school’s playground as a memorial for a girl in the grade above me who was killed in a suicide bombing at a popular downtown Jerusalem restaurant. In Israel, everyone knows someone who was killed in a terrorist attack.
Most problems that we, as Americans, encounter on a daily basis seem to be of an internal, more personal nature. We don’t spend much time thinking about how our country is affected by other countries because, in truth, our daily lives aren’t greatly affected by other countries. I doubt anyone pulls up at a gas pump to discover that gas costs double what it used to and thinks about the external causes for the increased expense. The automatic reaction rarely goes further than “F—ing gas prices!”
At the end of the day, though, what can we do? Maybe to a certain extent, America has its own little ecosystem going, and that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe we need our own unique ways of dealing with our own unique issues.
All I know is my shower the other morning was as refreshing as always, and I didn’t boil any water. It was beautiful. Of course, I did feel bad after my dad told me that another one of the county orders was to conserve water.
Shai Goller is an English and studio art major and a designer and a cartoonist for The Diamondback. He can be reached at sgoller@umd.edu.
