The Lebanese attitude
A good person would never take
sides in his neighbor’s domestic disputes. He may try to extinguish a fiery
argument by trying to get the parties to reconcile, but he would never take
sides in the hope of deriving some personal benefit, that would be too obscene.
Well, clearly Lebanon is not
a good neighbor; and as a result, our involvement in Syria on one side of the dispute or
the other, has cost us our own peace of mind. Maybe next time (if there is a
next time) we will learn to mind our own business and pray to God that our deep
political rifts do not erupt into full blown civil war too.
The Lebanese have a very wild
imagination and they perceive reality in their own special way. They see their
country as a cross between the Wild West, some American western territory in
the mid to late 1800s where the law has a patchy presence at best, and the Monte Carlo of the James
Bond movies. In reality, we are a cross between Mos Eisley (Star Wars
reference) and an amalgam of every third-world mess of an urban sprawl that
ever lived under a cloud of beige chemical soup from South America to Asia .
When I refer to Lebanon it must be clear that I refer to the Lebanon I know,
or have recently become acquainted with (seven years going on eight now). I talk
of course about the deluded urbanities that still believe in the lies sold to
them by bankers and realtors, those who live along the coastal strip from Beirut to Jounieh and in
the hills overlooking the sea. These people would like nothing more that to get
on with business as usual and when it comes to fixing the root causes of deep
seated problems, they balk and take a step back or stick their heads in the
sand and pretend the problems don’t exist, or maybe they think that if they
close their eyes and wish hard enough their problems will go away when they
open them again. Whatever their excuse, fear of facing an unpalatable reality motivates
the vast majority.
The Lebanese are obsessed with
foreigners. They welcome the white skinned blue-eyed European or the wealthy ‘Khaleeji’,
often referred to as ‘3arab’ by locals who wish to emphasis that while Gulf
nationals are Arabs we the Lebanese are most certainly not Arabs. The Lebanese are
also deeply suspicious of foreigners who they feel have no business coming to Lebanon , i.e. Asian or African domestic or
menial workers and refugees, these hapless traumatized people who were unlucky
enough to head to the wrong border and land in Lebanon without money. ‘How dare
they be refugees in our country,’ the Lebanese think, ‘they must be hear to
steal my job, my land, or my money.’ Thus develops this deeply ingrained paranoia
of refugees. This anti-refugee attitude has been around for a while; it is
learned from experience, specifically Lebanon ’s experience with Palestinian
refugees and the armed Palestinian revolution that lived among the refugees.
Above all, the Lebanese are
children who desperately wish they do not have to grow up and actually find a
workable formula for coexistence. They cling to the familiar, the feudal and
religious edifices of the past, for comfort and reassurance. But there is no
more reassurances to be given, our problems have grown too heavy and too large
to ignore and we either face the reality that the old formula of coexistence no
longer works and start working towards a new one, or we continue to languish in
limbo until some external force gives us some momentum to change, or change
happens without our approval, without our input, and we find ourselves suddenly
at the mercy or a raging sea.
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