Human beings are shockingly adaptable. Some live in the Arctic, in the searing heat of the deserts, while other live in the suffocating humidity of the rainforest. Still others live in urban jungles or on mountaintops, as well as in the temperate zones. Some wear no clothes at all, while others are covered from head to toe in burqas.
Yet all of us live with different degrees of violence and different styles of government control and oppression.
Against the backdrop of a country flattened by the US War Machine (for no good reason, at all), leaving the country in tatters and subject to the depredations of the US-armed and -trained ISIS, we see a heartening glimpse of how life somehow manages to go on in the ancient city of Baghdad.
Families still take their children to carnivals and to eat ice cream, young boys dive into irrigation canals to beat the 120ºF heat, while teenagers jump out of their cars in traffic jams, to dance in the streets with the sheer exuberance of youth.
The locals don’t worry about the bombs. They don’t have that luxury. They say, “We don’t worry about the bombs. They’re just a fact of life. Your only hope is to be far enough away [to avoid injury] – or close enough, that you’re gone quickly.”
Most videos from Iraq don’t make you smile. This one will, in a rare, surprising, humanizing look at the everyday lives of young Iraqis.
