A Cup and Two Statements
In the Diwaniya, everyone was watching the news, constantly switching channels. The strange thing was that all the channels were repeating the same words, as if they were reading from the same script!
The young man said, “The anchors must all be in a WhatsApp group, waiting for a message from the admin.”
The older man asked, “What do you mean?”
The young man replied, “Don’t you notice that they all started their bulletins with the exact same sentence: ‘Tensions are high in the region.’ I’ve heard it so many times that I start saying it before the anchor does.”
The old man laughed and said, “Alright, let me give you next week’s schedule before the news channels do. Monday: fiery statements. Tuesday: strong-worded threats. Wednesday: informed sources reveal, and other sources deny. Thursday: military movements and muscle-flexing, without even a drop of oil. Friday: urgent warning. Saturday: the world on the brink of abyss. Sunday: international mediation... and postponing everything until further notice.”
Everyone burst out laughing. The young man said, “I swear, if we gave this scenario to an elementary school child, they could predict the entire week’s events and probably get full marks.”
The old man added, “Even oil knows its role. As soon as it hears the word ‘escalation,’ it spikes. And as soon as it hears ‘mediation,’ it returns to its place, as if nothing happened.”
The older man said, “As for the poor citizen, every week he rushes to the market, buying rice, oil, sugar, and cases of water, thinking war has broken out. Then, two days later, he discovers that what happened was just a press conference, followed by a group photo and smiles.”
The expert shook his head while scrolling through X (formerly Twitter) and said, “The strange thing is that politicians argue through statements, analysts throw insults at each other on TV screens, while the citizen wrings his hands just to make sure his salary reaches him by the end of the month.”
The young man said, “It feels like the whole world has become an Indian soap opera. The bullet appears in the first episode, but doesn’t hit its target until episode fifty.”
The old man replied, laughing, “No, my dear, this isn’t a soap opera. It’s a rerun. And the rerun has reruns, until the receiver gets fed up and says, ‘I beg you, don’t rerun this episode because I’ve memorized it.’”
The older man laughed and said, “All that’s missing now is a commercial break saying: ‘Stay tuned next week for the same events, the same statements, but with new graphics.’”
Silence fell for a moment. The elderly man entered, carrying a traditional coffee pot (dallah), and heard the last words. He smiled and said, “My children, don’t believe that every shout is war, or every smile is peace.
Politics is like a Friday market: more talk, less action... and when the cannons fire their invoices, the citizen pays for years.
He smiled and said, “Come on... turn down the news a bit, and pour me a cup of coffee. I think today’s coffee is more truthful than many statements.”
The wealthy man said, “Imagine having no eyebrows to express your anger, so no one knows how you feel!”
At that moment, Sheikh Zaghloul’s call to the noon prayer reached our ears.
A Kuwaiti writer
