Listen not to the soothsayers, work hard, trust only God
Greetings readers and welcome to 2012, a year of boundless possibilities. Yes,I said boundless possibilities. I believe in this country's potential and in its people. Tough, this year will be, challenging, certainly, but I feel it will also bring many positive changes. Why so upbeat? Because as long as we are comfortable and satisfied with what we have we have no motivation to change, thus nothing changes.
Only when we are pushed out of our comfort zones do the little grey cells begin to work overtime. Our brain, like any muscle in our body, needs to be exercised to keep coming up with brilliant ideas. There is nothing like a fire to exercise our reflexes and sprinting skills, and there is nothing like multiple crises, both economic and political, to keep us at the top of our game.
The Lebanese, out of necessity, have always prided themselves on being at the top of their game in thinking their way out of multiple crises and conundrums. They are a can-do bunch when faced with sudden and unexpected problems; it’s just their long term planning and strategizing skills that need work. But that is understandable; we never had the time to settle down, no sooner do we overcome one crisis than we enter a new one. Long term planning in a country driven by short term triggers is simply not a priority.
ARE WE JUST SHOPKEEPERS?
We are a nation of shopkeepers. I’ve said this before, maybe on this blog, maybe not, but I still believe it. The implications of this are dire for nation building, but very positive for profit making, solid banking, unbridled capitalism, and individual freedoms, up to a point. The first rule of private shopkeepers is: never miss an opportunity to get people to spend their money regardless of what is or is not in customers’ welfare. This is something Ronnie Barker’s character ‘Arkwright’ in the BBC sitcom ‘Open All Hours’ would agree with wholeheartedly.
Because we have chosen to ignore nation building all these many decades so as not to tread on any toes and because our local tribal and confessional leaders’ interests were not best served by such nation building exercises, we have tended to focus more on personal financial aggrandizement while ignoring the community and national institutions. It is this selfish instinct that has evolved in us out of a basic need, the need to be safe and secure in our old age, safe from destitution, safe in our ability to pay our own health maintenance costs which increase with age, since we cannot rely on the state.
With a foreign passport in our pocket we are (or think we are) safe from our country’s ‘volcanic tendencies’ and the risk of unplanned eruptions. We take a job in the Gulf, work hard, and horde cash like demented squirrels for the winter of our lives.
Of course when a financial winter sets in over the entire world we feel justified in our course and never hesitate to tell whoever is listening how right we were and how wonderful our banking system is and how wrong the rest of the world has been. Like Arkwright’s ‘Oxo tin’ stuffed with solid silver coins, hard cash is a comfort, isn’t it? Or is it? Well, it is, up to a point.
We have money, but we have little else of value. We have no productive sectors to speak off; not really, I mean we don’t have a flourishing export, something akin to Holland’s Tulip industry, or Finland’s Nokia, or Sweden’s IKEA. We have good tourist potential, but we destroy a little bit of it each year.
You could say we have young, educated, highly skilled young men and women to send to the Gulf. Well, maybe, but how skilled are they really, how solid is their education? Its a fair question to ask. How many local universities issue degrees today? Who monitors their standards? How skilled are our young men and women in meeting the demands of the modern workplace? This all comes back down to nation building, if we had built solid institutions and enforced high standards from the start, our graduates, all our graduates, would be better trained and better equipped. Its often said that our educational system does not give students real world skills.
In times of growth we have continued to horde, stuffing our local banks’ vaults to bursting. Every investment instinct we have is aimed at what generates the greatest immediate returns, not what accrues the widest benefit and ensures long term sustained profitability. We rarely invest in the community, in human resources. We invest in real estate; in fact we've invested in real estate so much that we pushed prices up to unprecedented levels.
In the absence of community minded legislation, we have no really enforceable rules on where to build high rises and where not to build them. One result, for example, is the devastation of Ashrafieh’s quaint, village-in-a-city feel, as high rises consume more and more of the skyline and a growing population puts more strain on inadequate infrastructure. But, at least we made money from real estate.
We can’t expect the bulk of our expatriate workforce in the Gulf to all be savvy investors, most will tend to follow the crowd on investing, and the crowd will tend to follow itself, much like a dog chasing its own tail. Dizzy yet? I know I am.
A friend of the family once told us a story. It was the mid-1990s and this friend was mugged in the New York subway. He was inconsolable, he ran to the nearest transit cop to report the theft. “They took my bill fold with ten thousand dollars in it,” the frantic friend told the perplexed cop. “Why were you carrying so much in cash?” was the officer’s first response. Usually, carrying that much cash indicates a person is about to conduct some shady transaction, maybe a drug deal, plus the guy was from the Middle East!
Of course the officer did not know that this friend came from a country fresh out of civil war were carrying large amounts of cash on one’s person was not unusual just in case one had to bolt at a moment’s notice. The only security back then was cold, hard cash.
WAR IS OVER
The war is over and the Lebanese have the right, finally, to feel safe. No amount of sophisticated alarm systems, no amount of cash in bank accounts, no manner of modern weaponry, no SUV no matter how large and menacing on the road, will ever make us feel safe, not really. Being safe is a hunger we have from birth that remains unsatisfied.
Many in Lebanon are stoic about this state of affairs, others have settled into a comfortable routine built around uncertainty, but there will always be that need to feel safe and it will only grow in us the older we get. Only solid, dependable institutions, a state that cares and plans for the welfare of its people, a country that is at peace with itself, an economy that is robust and growing in the right way, only these things will ensure that we never feel like globetrotting, nervous orphans ever again.
WHY SO UPBEAT NOW?
So, why am I so optimistic about 2012? The answer can be found in a quote from a great man who believed in his country’s victory over adversity when no one else was sure what to do. A man whose solid, unwavering, stubborn course likened him to one of his country’s most beloved symbols, the bulldog, he was of course Winston Churchill: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
But this does not mean that my new rose-colored-glasses blind me to the very difficult realities we are facing. I know how fragile our present national condition is, I know how destabilizing regional developments are, and I recognize that should Iran’s empire building persist and troubles in Syria and Iraq get further inflamed, we will not be spared. But, here also, solid nation building is our only recourse and our only defense.
Only when we are pushed out of our comfort zones do the little grey cells begin to work overtime. Our brain, like any muscle in our body, needs to be exercised to keep coming up with brilliant ideas. There is nothing like a fire to exercise our reflexes and sprinting skills, and there is nothing like multiple crises, both economic and political, to keep us at the top of our game.
The Lebanese, out of necessity, have always prided themselves on being at the top of their game in thinking their way out of multiple crises and conundrums. They are a can-do bunch when faced with sudden and unexpected problems; it’s just their long term planning and strategizing skills that need work. But that is understandable; we never had the time to settle down, no sooner do we overcome one crisis than we enter a new one. Long term planning in a country driven by short term triggers is simply not a priority.
ARE WE JUST SHOPKEEPERS?
We are a nation of shopkeepers. I’ve said this before, maybe on this blog, maybe not, but I still believe it. The implications of this are dire for nation building, but very positive for profit making, solid banking, unbridled capitalism, and individual freedoms, up to a point. The first rule of private shopkeepers is: never miss an opportunity to get people to spend their money regardless of what is or is not in customers’ welfare. This is something Ronnie Barker’s character ‘Arkwright’ in the BBC sitcom ‘Open All Hours’ would agree with wholeheartedly.
Because we have chosen to ignore nation building all these many decades so as not to tread on any toes and because our local tribal and confessional leaders’ interests were not best served by such nation building exercises, we have tended to focus more on personal financial aggrandizement while ignoring the community and national institutions. It is this selfish instinct that has evolved in us out of a basic need, the need to be safe and secure in our old age, safe from destitution, safe in our ability to pay our own health maintenance costs which increase with age, since we cannot rely on the state.
With a foreign passport in our pocket we are (or think we are) safe from our country’s ‘volcanic tendencies’ and the risk of unplanned eruptions. We take a job in the Gulf, work hard, and horde cash like demented squirrels for the winter of our lives.
Of course when a financial winter sets in over the entire world we feel justified in our course and never hesitate to tell whoever is listening how right we were and how wonderful our banking system is and how wrong the rest of the world has been. Like Arkwright’s ‘Oxo tin’ stuffed with solid silver coins, hard cash is a comfort, isn’t it? Or is it? Well, it is, up to a point.
We have money, but we have little else of value. We have no productive sectors to speak off; not really, I mean we don’t have a flourishing export, something akin to Holland’s Tulip industry, or Finland’s Nokia, or Sweden’s IKEA. We have good tourist potential, but we destroy a little bit of it each year.
You could say we have young, educated, highly skilled young men and women to send to the Gulf. Well, maybe, but how skilled are they really, how solid is their education? Its a fair question to ask. How many local universities issue degrees today? Who monitors their standards? How skilled are our young men and women in meeting the demands of the modern workplace? This all comes back down to nation building, if we had built solid institutions and enforced high standards from the start, our graduates, all our graduates, would be better trained and better equipped. Its often said that our educational system does not give students real world skills.
In times of growth we have continued to horde, stuffing our local banks’ vaults to bursting. Every investment instinct we have is aimed at what generates the greatest immediate returns, not what accrues the widest benefit and ensures long term sustained profitability. We rarely invest in the community, in human resources. We invest in real estate; in fact we've invested in real estate so much that we pushed prices up to unprecedented levels.
In the absence of community minded legislation, we have no really enforceable rules on where to build high rises and where not to build them. One result, for example, is the devastation of Ashrafieh’s quaint, village-in-a-city feel, as high rises consume more and more of the skyline and a growing population puts more strain on inadequate infrastructure. But, at least we made money from real estate.
We can’t expect the bulk of our expatriate workforce in the Gulf to all be savvy investors, most will tend to follow the crowd on investing, and the crowd will tend to follow itself, much like a dog chasing its own tail. Dizzy yet? I know I am.
A friend of the family once told us a story. It was the mid-1990s and this friend was mugged in the New York subway. He was inconsolable, he ran to the nearest transit cop to report the theft. “They took my bill fold with ten thousand dollars in it,” the frantic friend told the perplexed cop. “Why were you carrying so much in cash?” was the officer’s first response. Usually, carrying that much cash indicates a person is about to conduct some shady transaction, maybe a drug deal, plus the guy was from the Middle East!
Of course the officer did not know that this friend came from a country fresh out of civil war were carrying large amounts of cash on one’s person was not unusual just in case one had to bolt at a moment’s notice. The only security back then was cold, hard cash.
WAR IS OVER
The war is over and the Lebanese have the right, finally, to feel safe. No amount of sophisticated alarm systems, no amount of cash in bank accounts, no manner of modern weaponry, no SUV no matter how large and menacing on the road, will ever make us feel safe, not really. Being safe is a hunger we have from birth that remains unsatisfied.
Many in Lebanon are stoic about this state of affairs, others have settled into a comfortable routine built around uncertainty, but there will always be that need to feel safe and it will only grow in us the older we get. Only solid, dependable institutions, a state that cares and plans for the welfare of its people, a country that is at peace with itself, an economy that is robust and growing in the right way, only these things will ensure that we never feel like globetrotting, nervous orphans ever again.
WHY SO UPBEAT NOW?
So, why am I so optimistic about 2012? The answer can be found in a quote from a great man who believed in his country’s victory over adversity when no one else was sure what to do. A man whose solid, unwavering, stubborn course likened him to one of his country’s most beloved symbols, the bulldog, he was of course Winston Churchill: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
But this does not mean that my new rose-colored-glasses blind me to the very difficult realities we are facing. I know how fragile our present national condition is, I know how destabilizing regional developments are, and I recognize that should Iran’s empire building persist and troubles in Syria and Iraq get further inflamed, we will not be spared. But, here also, solid nation building is our only recourse and our only defense.
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