Lebanon searching for deliverance from the wolves of war, chaos and collapse

There is little to do in Lebanon, little paid work to be done, and what work there is, is pointless and poorly paid. Here we live in the hope that we shall eventually be delivered from the monsters, the wolves of our Lebanese government, Cabinet and Parliament and all the power-brokers that manipulate our lives. I once asked a political science professor “why do politicians always wear suits and ties?” He answered jokingly: “so you don’t see their snake’s skin”, I guess if they wore hats it would be so we don’t see their devil’s horns, or is that meant only for men of the cloth…?

 

Regardless of which political side you ask about our country’s future, the answer would likely be the same, that things are looking bleak and the blame is always laid at the door of the “other side”, because your interlocutor will never make the mistake of accepting that his/her side shares any of the blame for catastrophe. Lebanese society remains highly polarized politically and ideologically. Archaic religious, sectarian and cultural values and norms still govern our knee jerk political affiliations and our outbursts not to mention our voting behavior. We elected fools, therefore we must be a nation of fools, so goes the accepted maxim.

 

I recently met an old friend and publisher who hails from a family of prominent and respected journalists, I found him optimistic about the future in Lebanon. “There is nowhere left for them to hide,” he said, speaking of our snake-like politicos. Of course he’s right, the total collapse of everything and the drying up of traditional sources of beggary/financing, has left our political class exposed, quite literally in the financial sense of the word, and figuratively in the political sense as well. He felt that political players across the spectrum in Lebanon have lost the respect of their own people, but also, and more crucially, these same political actors who once suppressed dissent so brutally, find they can no longer do so with impunity.

 

It is a brave new world. However, often the dawn of so much hopefulness tends to dissipate into darkness because respected leaders in their societies remain hesitant to act fearing they would lose what they have. No one wants to face up to monsters, we would much rather hide under our beds. 

 

A year before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, founding father and then ambassador to France for the Continental Congress, penned a letter in which he talked about the nature of European governments of the time. In it he states that European governments have divided their nation into two contending classes where the government were like wolves who devoured the wealth of the people, who were like sheep. Jefferson warns that all governments, even the new American government of which he was a key member, unless checked by a knowledgeable citizenry, would inevitably become wolves. 

 

Comparing a government to ravenous wolves resonates with me and probably will with every Lebanese reading this. Our government led by a corrupt political cabal has pounced on a divided and ignorant people and devoured us whole. They may have not physically torn into our flesh, but they took away our financial freedom, our security, our ability to generate wealth anew, they left us, the middle class, with nothing. They have ensured our slow and painful demise, shortened the lives of many, caused others to develop chronic illnesses from the stress and anxiety of trying to keep their heads above water, while others, weakened and disillusioned and racked with depressive thoughts, chose the easy way out, suicide. The corpses are piling up, just not all at once as in a war, which is easily filmed by newsreel cameras. Ours is a slow death over many years. When a young man or woman leave their homeland and family for work abroad because of economic pressures, it is like a death in the family. The empty homes inhabited by septuagenarians and octogenarians, ring with the quiet sobs of lonely mothers. Make no mistake, the wolves have been here!  

 

I’ve been thinking a lot on Jefferson these past few days, as the invigorating freshness in the cooling mountain breezes has given me a renewed boost of energy. Jefferson is very protective of the rights of his citizenry and urges his contemporaries to ensure an informed citizenry has the tools to keep the power of government in check.

 

“The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their (the people’s) errors will tend to keep these (governors) to the true principles of their institution,” Jefferson wrote. We forget that Lebanon is in fact a country of institutions, the most important of which is that which legislates and executes laws and budgets and projects for the public good, that mass of suit-wearing men of a certain age we collectively refer to as Al Sulta or “the authority” in English.

 

Jefferson warns that “to punish these errors (of the people) too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.” He basically says that even when the people are wrong, they are right. This is their government after all, not the king’s, their congress, their country, they decide about its affairs, not a handful of powerful people at the top!

 

He further says that “the way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people (placing the government’s power between the people and their liberties) is to give them (the people) full information of their affairs through the channel of the public (news) papers, and to contrive (arrange) that those (news) papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. 

 

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

 

In Jefferson’s time, newspapers were the only way to disseminate information to the widest possible swathe of the populace, provided they could read, which he makes a point to mention. Now you would tell me that we are far better informed than the people of colonial and post-colonial America. After all the very blog you are reading right now is evidence of how better informed we are. However, too much contradictory, poorly curated, badly presented information, partisan propaganda and divisive angry rhetoric masquerading as news fed to us through the vehicle of social media and the world wide web, can be a toxic mix that makes fools of us all, and not just fools, but willfully ignorant ones at that.

 

Our problem isn’t the lack of newspapers and sources of information or illiteracy, our problem is the lack of independent sources of news that focus on the people’s right to be informed and knowledgeable about the affairs of their government, so that such an informed citizenry may chose the path our country takes and not a small group of powerful politicians, which is how things stand today in Lebanon. 

 

There is a reason I still lament the closure of my one time employer, The Daily Star, the English language newspaper of record for the Lebanese since 1952. If the Star was anything, it was a sane and fair, but often critical observer and commentator on our Lebanese condition. Its loss is still deeply felt, even as other pretenders to its throne have since emerged to assume that lofty mantel, but have failed miserably.

 

I do believe is a bright a brave new dawn for Lebanon, and I believe the narrowing of options for the squirming politicos of our country makes that dawn all that much closer. But, even if all the conditions are ripe for serious change, such change can only be led by a free, informed and unafraid citizenry.