By Yasmina Naja | Staff Writer
As I’m woken up from deep sleep by my whole building rocking back and forth in the middle of the night, I feel my heart racing, my hands shaking and my head spinning, I got a gut wrenching feeling of deja vu, and I thought to myself, I can’t go through this again.
6th of February 2023
I snapped out of the bubble I had built for myself, a bubble built to protect what is left of my heart, and saw for a second the horrible nightmare we are living in. The sad reality of my generation specifically. I’m from the generation that graduated during the first year of the pandemic, the generation that didn’t do official Baccalaureate exams, and didn’t get to graduate properly…
The generation that started university on Zoom, without having properly completed their high-school education, and having to figure out how to teach themselves complex university level courses…
The generation that saw mass emigration like never before, and had all their friends leave after finishing school…
The generation that’s only still in Lebanon because they are stuck here…
The generation that saw their home country collapse economically, socially, financially…
The generation that had their home city explode and has panic attacks over loud noises…
The generation that can’t sleep with the windows closed…
The generation that cries every fourth of August and stopped hoping while cleaning the rubble and blood…
The generation that’s paying the price of their parents’ and grandparents’ mistakes.
The generation that never got justice; that no one ever said sorry to.
And while looking for a sense of stability – any kind of sense in this mess of a country – and putting the pieces of our lives and homes back together, some of us are falling into old patterns. We continue making our parents and grandparents’ mistakes and continuing the vicious cycle of diving into the dark and cruel sea of sectarianism, corruption and hate, while still looking for a lifeboat, abandoning the land of hope.
That’s what happens when you deprive a generation of stability, when you rip them to shreds and spit on their rights. When you burn their city and future and murder in cold blood the person they could have become if they ever knew stability. Either they leave, abandon this wasteland, get on planes or boats and never look back, turn their homes into a vacation destination or a place they used to know, a place they send money or letters to, a place they resent, where teta and jedo live alone. Or they are stuck back in the quicksand of corruption and try to adapt to it the best way they can while planning an escape plan.