I don’t like what I see, what about you?

I can see clearly now the fog is gone…
But I’m not going to break out in spontaneous song…
Nor am I going to sing for joy and extol the azure sea and blue sky, the glistening white snow covered peaks, or bright golden sun, because these things will continue to happen regardless of mankind’s condition. As I said, I can see clearly now, but I don’t like what I see.

Lebanon is a great if small piece of real estate, so great in fact that its people can barely resist raping its bounty and leaving behind nothing but gapping holes, smog shrouded concrete and steal protrusions, silent seas, bald hillsides, utter, complete, and absolute ugliness. Mankind should know all about ugliness.

We are slowly dying of unnatural causes, our greed, our lack of respect for or enforcement of laws is killing us all. There is hardly a young man or women I know in their early twenties to mid-30s who doesn’t know someone of their generation, friend or family, who isn’t suffering and slowly dying of cancer. The causes are many; the sickness in society is one: A total disregard for each other’s welfare. From the lowly taxi driver, or neighborhood grocer to the CEO of a big corporation, this is a country populated by criminal opportunists whose small, seemingly insignificant day to day decisions contribute to the death of thousands and the poisoning of generations.

Stories that make your blood boil are in the news every day: The discovery of consignments of spoilt meat unfit for human consumption, food stores and eateries that cut corners on issues of food safety, buildings built to a shoddy standard, or poorly maintained, or unprofessionally renovated collapsing all over the place, fake medicines, herbal or other natural products making unsubstantiated curative claims openly on local television stations, everything from alcohol and cigarettes to energy drinks are sold everywhere and God only knows if they are sold to minors or not.

Any system that relies on the individual consciences of businessmen and opportunists ‘to do the right thing’ will fail, as ours has, it will fail in protecting the general public who are generally oblivious to the dangers of the food they eat, or the air they breathe, or the water they drink, and know very little about the value they get for the money they pay. Businessmen are human and as such open to all sorts of temptations, but unlike a drug addict, for example, whose poor decisions kill only him, a business owner’s decision to break or disregard the law, will likely kill many.

I think we fear statistics in this country, we don’t like what they show us, usually it’s an unflattering reflection of who we really are. It is this fear that has prevented us from gathering reliable data on the rise in the number of cancer cases and deaths from cancer, or the astronomical (I’m guessing here) rise in the number of heart attacks and strokes. We are not only an unhealthy society plodding along, spiraling downward at a steady pace; we are now manically racing towards our own doom.

Sometimes I almost wish for war, for a natural disaster, for a cleansing force, a flood to wipe away all the filth, to allow us to rebuild from scratch, but I know all too well that we don’t have to wait too long for that! If God doesn’t lose His patience with us soon and smite us in one way or another, our region and immediate neighborhood will likely implode and disappear down the sinkhole of war and despair, taking our fragile and fractured country down with it.

It’s not a pretty picture, I know. This is one reason for my long silence on this blog; another is my utter disgust at myself for not having the courage to speak out more against what is happening across our border and in the other Arab countries. Words are so useless in these circumstances, they make so little difference when children die every day.

I feel like breaking out of my own skin and declaring to the world: “I am not one of them, I am not one of these butchers, and I am not one of these Arab monsters.” But I can’t, I have to live this nightmare to its end, with my eyes wide open, unable to avert my gaze, struck dumb by the horrors I see, feel, hear, and experience.

Are we all just little, goose stepping Hitlers in the making? Are we that ignoble that we can eat, drink, smile, laugh, and breathe, while giving ourselves that much worn out and disgusting excuse that we are 'afraid', and as such justify doing nothing? After all, we tell ourselves, one man/woman can do nothing, change nothing, that we are powerless against the powers that control our fates and the fate of our country and the region. If that is the case then I long for death.

I don’t like what I see and I know most people don’t like it either, I know most people are too afraid to speak and I know they see what I see, but we must not avert our gaze, we must not long to awaken from this nightmare, we must see it through to the end come what may. We must do what our divine nature requires of us, to be strong, to be brave, and to be willing to die for what we believe in: A better future for everyone, not just for the elite. These Holy lands, from the Red Sea to Allepo, have absorbed more blood of Holy martyrs than any other land. Facing death freely and on our own terms is the privilege of the brave and the lucky few.

Through out history the shaheed stood for something, for a better world, a more compassionate, faithful world, a world that was fair and just inspired by the divine, to create an ideal community on Earth so lofty that few men could hope to understand it let alone try to apply it properly, although a few have come close.

Let me leave you with these words from a tough man who led a tough and stubborn nation through its darkest days of war and privation to come out victorious in the end, Sir Winston Churchill: “If you are going through hell, keep going…” It makes sense; the last place you would want to stop for a rest is in hell.