My Short-sided View

For my amazing, four-person class of Africa and the Middle East, I was asked to post what my view is of the Middle East and how my background has influenced that view.  This request is impossible to fulfill without confronting extreme bias often and rather truthfully stereotyped to United States citizens.  When is this more obvious or heart-wrenching than just after 9/11?
           Looking across the wide expanse of American ideals too often taken for granted (and of course the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and the Mediterranean), I see revolution, religion, and rage pervading from what presently seems to be the world's center of international conflict.  Riddled pasts of dictatorship, greatly divided classes of wealth, and the over-publicized terrorism skunk up the ocean breeze on United States coasts, but lately I have been doubting my nose.  The true definition of a weed is simply an unwanted plant.  While I may see a cultivation of strange flowers and crops from afar, how differently must the planters see their garden.  So as I crane my neck and stretch my eyes, I never expect to see the perfect image of Middle Eastern society with all the experiences of love, life, and government.  Instead I fill my queries with second- or third-hand reports of terror, extreme wealth and poverty, unstable government, and more developing questions of whether or not the news feeds even resemble the truth. 
          While the world and news of it is such that I feel I can not have any opinions that truly reflect my own beliefs, I will take a guess at the hidden truths behind all things perceived from this hazy region.  The Middle East clearly has its own strong foundation of religion and culture at total odds with the Western world.  I think that the Middle East is an enigma to Western Society because they are the first successful and sustaining threat to core Western beliefs.  The culture there is becoming more and more modern, but in a completely different way than Western powers can predict.  Middle Eastern culture grows and develops into democratic government in a completely threatening environment, with many "helping" countrys' cultures clashing and influencing the Middle Eastern culture in potentially negative ways.  Any perceived "attack" will undoubtedly provoke an impressive counter attack when the whole of society lives on the defensive side at all times.  I experience this all the time with an overreacting sister who feels that her unfortunate position as "baby of the family" is constantly being threatened or accused.  In the case of Middle Eastern countries, their reactions to defend entire ways of life are appropriately exponential in this silly comparison. 
          So how exactly do I interpret the Middle East?  I see the region, knowing that I slant my views even to group these different countries into one subject, as an adolescent revolution where people are expressing their voices, holding onto the fundamental beliefs of their "childhood," and adapting into what will soon be powerfully influential countries of unique and prominent culture. 
AGUAMAN!!