Pay Dispute

In 2006, I was driving out of Beirut airport in the backseat of a taxi when I had a horrible thought. Around me, cars were driving in and out of lanes, zipping past one another in dangerous manoeuvres and in disturbing excess of the speed limit, over packed with passengers sticking their arms, legs and even their heads out of windows.

Some were even joy riding on the roof of the vehicles in question, though this had more to do with a bizarre system of car pooling than anything else.

But my horrible thought did not in fact revolve around this chaos, but in the fact that in the midst of this was a lone police officer, driving along in relative calm as if blissfully unaware of the throngs of madness around him, but doing so because the scene I just painted was simply a part of the everyday and he no longer had a role in it. Would life in Australia ever be the same?

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