Good luck and Godspeed
If you are leaving Lebanon, good luck and Godspeed to you and yours, keep going, do not look back or think of what you leave behind, just be thankful, you have been saved. There will always be kind souls who will place flowers on the graves of loved ones. The rest of us must stay behind for whatever reason, my advice is forget us, unless our paths happen to cross in some safe, foreign land where the birds still sing.
You have to be merciless and tear out your own beating heart and cast it on the flames. Stop telling people you are Lebanese, it’s really not a point you would want to stress. To my dear naturalized 48ees, i.e. all you Palestinian-Lebanese out there who have had to adopt Lebanese accents over the past half century, its time to find a new accent to adopt.
Lebanon is the tragedy of the millennium, some Lebanese would tell you, and as violins play a sad dirge in the background they will insist that all what happened to their country was other people’s fault and not their own.
The real Lebanese tragedy is this country’s third-world, small-minded, agressive people who could not find the inner strength to abandon their tribal/feudal loyalties in favor of a truly pluralist democracy, a democracy built on foundations of fairness and equality, a country that brings people equal access to education and opportunities for growth and advancement. Only an educated, aware and financially independent electorate votes their conscience, the hungry vote only for their next meal.
As all of Lebanon is gripped by the soothsayer-trend I thought of throwing my own hat into the ring for what it’s worth and try my hand at foretelling something really big to come.
War, what is it good for? Apparently it’s good for quiet a lot of things in the Middle East which is aflame, what else is new. The fire is getting closer to our roasting behinds and we will soon be consumed by it.
This time Lebanon shall take the offensive and liberate Palestine. Then fire from the sky will descend on us all and the moon which is in the fifth house and Mars which is in apex and transiting across Saturn the grave digger, shall ensure a plentiful harvest of corpses and grave diggers will find gainful employment… or so ye olde oracle sayeth. Then the floods will come, followed by famine as all the food in the fridge will spoil and the ice in the freezer will melt because the power will be cut. Gold will rise. Sweat will form in the underpants as the A/C will no longer work and the heat shall rise and so will the voices, so sayeth the oracle.
Well, that was an interesting diversion into gobbledygook, but seriously, how hard is it to predict the predictable?
Of course the fact that our lives will turn even more hellish than they already are does not require such a huge stretch of the imagination to believe. In seeking the soothing words of the predictable predictors, we seek some confirmation of future events in a world that is frightening and unpredictable to us.
The Lebanese hate to prepare for anything; we would rather wait until the absolute last minute before we deign to take any action to fix a problem, case in point: EDL. In many respects we are quintessentially Arab: emotional and easy to anger.
The Arab Spring was a great idea, I think, but all I saw were people who knew what they did not want but no idea what they really want. Democracy is an essential first step not the goal. It allows people to participate in their own government without holding public office. A constitution and system of government built around this principle ensure that whoever has a majority can rule and effect real change but also that a majority may not remain so for too long. Continuity of government and transfer of power become little more than a mundane routine.
By contrast today we see some Arab people demanding dictators step down not to replace them with a system that is fair and works for everybody, but to replace him with their own tribal leader, their own man. In Egypt, the army is in control, Mubarak is on trial, but people are still conflicted on what direction they want the country to go in. They do not want to invest the time needed to build a new system; they want to fill Tahreer Square and chant slogans because that is a freedom that gives them instant gratification. Tantawi may be an army bureaucrat today serving the army and the people, but ten years down the road if nothing changes in Egypt and people still can’t decide what they want, he could become a worse version of Mubarak. After all, both men hail from the same institution.
We really are a violent, angry bunch of baboons, Arabs in general and Lebanese in particular, we display our rage in bullying behavior on the roads or we pour out our frustration on page after page on an online forum like this one and we applaud the Alpha male's primitive displays. We are truly a cursed people, a damned people. So if you have resolved to leave Lebanon, good luck and Godspeed, you made the right choice, think of your happy future elsewhere and stop worrying about what you leave behind. Its not much.
You have to be merciless and tear out your own beating heart and cast it on the flames. Stop telling people you are Lebanese, it’s really not a point you would want to stress. To my dear naturalized 48ees, i.e. all you Palestinian-Lebanese out there who have had to adopt Lebanese accents over the past half century, its time to find a new accent to adopt.
Lebanon is the tragedy of the millennium, some Lebanese would tell you, and as violins play a sad dirge in the background they will insist that all what happened to their country was other people’s fault and not their own.
The real Lebanese tragedy is this country’s third-world, small-minded, agressive people who could not find the inner strength to abandon their tribal/feudal loyalties in favor of a truly pluralist democracy, a democracy built on foundations of fairness and equality, a country that brings people equal access to education and opportunities for growth and advancement. Only an educated, aware and financially independent electorate votes their conscience, the hungry vote only for their next meal.
As all of Lebanon is gripped by the soothsayer-trend I thought of throwing my own hat into the ring for what it’s worth and try my hand at foretelling something really big to come.
War, what is it good for? Apparently it’s good for quiet a lot of things in the Middle East which is aflame, what else is new. The fire is getting closer to our roasting behinds and we will soon be consumed by it.
This time Lebanon shall take the offensive and liberate Palestine. Then fire from the sky will descend on us all and the moon which is in the fifth house and Mars which is in apex and transiting across Saturn the grave digger, shall ensure a plentiful harvest of corpses and grave diggers will find gainful employment… or so ye olde oracle sayeth. Then the floods will come, followed by famine as all the food in the fridge will spoil and the ice in the freezer will melt because the power will be cut. Gold will rise. Sweat will form in the underpants as the A/C will no longer work and the heat shall rise and so will the voices, so sayeth the oracle.
Well, that was an interesting diversion into gobbledygook, but seriously, how hard is it to predict the predictable?
Of course the fact that our lives will turn even more hellish than they already are does not require such a huge stretch of the imagination to believe. In seeking the soothing words of the predictable predictors, we seek some confirmation of future events in a world that is frightening and unpredictable to us.
The Lebanese hate to prepare for anything; we would rather wait until the absolute last minute before we deign to take any action to fix a problem, case in point: EDL. In many respects we are quintessentially Arab: emotional and easy to anger.
The Arab Spring was a great idea, I think, but all I saw were people who knew what they did not want but no idea what they really want. Democracy is an essential first step not the goal. It allows people to participate in their own government without holding public office. A constitution and system of government built around this principle ensure that whoever has a majority can rule and effect real change but also that a majority may not remain so for too long. Continuity of government and transfer of power become little more than a mundane routine.
By contrast today we see some Arab people demanding dictators step down not to replace them with a system that is fair and works for everybody, but to replace him with their own tribal leader, their own man. In Egypt, the army is in control, Mubarak is on trial, but people are still conflicted on what direction they want the country to go in. They do not want to invest the time needed to build a new system; they want to fill Tahreer Square and chant slogans because that is a freedom that gives them instant gratification. Tantawi may be an army bureaucrat today serving the army and the people, but ten years down the road if nothing changes in Egypt and people still can’t decide what they want, he could become a worse version of Mubarak. After all, both men hail from the same institution.
We really are a violent, angry bunch of baboons, Arabs in general and Lebanese in particular, we display our rage in bullying behavior on the roads or we pour out our frustration on page after page on an online forum like this one and we applaud the Alpha male's primitive displays. We are truly a cursed people, a damned people. So if you have resolved to leave Lebanon, good luck and Godspeed, you made the right choice, think of your happy future elsewhere and stop worrying about what you leave behind. Its not much.
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