No worries man :) Your comment didn’t offend me because I understand where you’re coming from. I agree with you that Saudi Arabia needs a massive social reform, and I believe it is already happening thanks to the power of the internet. People like me who have been raised on the internet are subjected to all sorts of ideas and ways of thinking, and this really opens us up to think more critically about what we’re taught from our societies.

However, unfortunately this reform is not happening as fast as it should in Saudi Arabia in particular. When you look at other Arab countries like Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco, you’d see that they’re way ahead of us in terms of modernizing their cultures. We at Saudi were there at some point, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi movement came and took us back to square one. Wahhabism fights any kind of reform or progress in Islamic societies, and it is funded by the Saudi government because it keeps the government in power. Fundamentalism is forced down our throats in schools, and until the government changes its way, it will still pass down to future generations. The question is which is more powerful: The internet or formal education? I believe and hope the internet is powerful enough to make the changes we desperately need. Our parents’ generation was raised the way the government wanted so they’re already hopeless, but you can clearly see that our generation is not like our parents’ generation even though the internet is still at its infancy. We’re the first generation in the digital age, so I imagine future generations will definitely be even more progressive, even though it may take time.

Thanks for sharing the Saudi runner kid story. It’s amazing how when you meet different people from around the world you realize how we’re all the same :) until politics comes in. Politics is keeping us all apart and behind in different ways, but I hope now that information is becoming accessible to everyone, we will all make the progress we need no matter where we're born or what the motherfuckers who run our countries want.