There have been a lot of classic ledes for Tom Friedman over the year
but today's may take the cake--or the Swiss chocolate in this case. At least he didn't ask the cashier for his common man opinion on a big subject, his usual manner. Here we go:
I was at a conference in Bern, Switzerland, last week and struggling
with my column. News of Russia’s proposal for Syria to surrender its
poison gas was just breaking and changing every hour, forcing me to
rewrite my column every hour. To clear my head, I went for a walk along
the Aare River, on Schifflaube Street. Along the way, I found a small
grocery shop and stopped to buy some nectarines. As I went to pay, I was
looking down, fishing for my Swiss francs, and when I looked up at the
cashier, I was taken aback: He had pink hair. A huge shock of neon pink
hair — very Euro-punk from the ’90s. While he was ringing me up, a young
woman walked by, and he blew her a kiss through the window — not a care
in the world.
Observing all this joie de vivre, I thought to myself: “Wow, wouldn’t it
be nice to be a Swiss? Maybe even to sport some pink hair?” Though I
can’t say for sure, I got the feeling that the man with pink hair was
not agonizing over the proper use of force against Bashar al-Assad. Not
his fault; his is a tiny country. I guess worrying about Syria is the
tax you pay for being an American or an American president — and coming
from the world’s strongest power that still believes, blessedly in my
view, that it has to protect the global commons. Barack Obama once had
black hair. But his is gray now, not pink. That’s also the tax you pay
for thinking about the Middle East too much: It leads to either gray
hair or no hair, but not pink hair.
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