By Garo Kerdelian | Staff Writer
Contradictions. A country of contradictions. A country with the deepest joys and the most intense sorrows, a country with the most united yet most divided people, a country dying in pain that has never been more alive. Lebanon.
For anyone who missed the morning news, Lebanon has been plagued by an acute political and economic crisis since October 2019. The currency has lost nearly all of its value, inflation has soared by so many percentage points that we have lost count, and the country is on a slippery slope to complete collapse.
But is it? Is the country truly collapsing?
On a bright Sunday afternoon, I see the Zaituna Bay restaurants filled with well-dressed customers, all eager to buy a simple meal for a minimum of 500,000 LBP each. The Beirut Corniche is bustling with families and children, eating, fishing, and smoking on the pavement. As I try to cross the road, innumerable horns and engine noises vibrate my ears and decorate the cosmopolitan landscape with urban noise.
Life. The city is still full of life – but how? How on Earth do the Lebanese people, including you and me, still continue our everyday lives and enjoy ourselves in a country with the third largest economic crisis in history?
I do not claim to have any answers. I do suggest, however, that several contradictions underlie the paradox of Lebanese existence.
Beneath the false, shallow appearances of familial joy and economic activity lie deeper, more sorrowful truths. For every street of bustling restaurants, there exists ten others with barely any customers; for every family skiing this weekend, there are twenty others that have never played, but yearn to play in the snow. Every day, we are practicing selection bias in choosing a small subset of the population to judge the situation around us, warping our perception of suffering with superficial niceties.
It is particularly tempting to do so as an AUB student. After all, we have the privilege – though, an earned privilege – of living as first world-citizens in a third-world country and enjoying a safe and peaceful campus isolated from external problems. It is indeed wonderful to chat with friends before classes, walk around the beautiful campus, and study in silent libraries focused and determined towards greatness. Still, it is hard to escape the cold truth: the moment you leave through Main Gate, you are faced with the reality of innumerable beggars and peddlers younger than your elementary school siblings. After meeting a few people and engaging in conversation, you will probably hear about people’s difficulties in procuring money, fuel, or basic utilities. Being an AUB student means to be at the forefront of the Lebanese contradiction of thriving and struggling at the same time.
Even if people may be able to survive, and even thrive, in tough circumstances, the question begs itself: why is the public not striving to improve the status quo in any way?
Over the past few years, we have developed a peculiar numbness to everything around us. The COVID-19 pandemic, which now seems a long time ago, turned us into stolid, robotic creatures and tore away our attachments to our communities and social values. As we have been repeatedly exposed to suffering, a sense of nonchalant indifference has seeped into our hearts and minds – an indifference that precludes us from realizing that our situation is deteriorating every day, an indifference dangerous to our collective existence.
The pages of Lebanese history are not lacking in disaster and conflict, and the general response of the Lebanese public has been to develop coping mechanisms for accepting the status quo and finding new ways around it, rather than developing a deep-seated frustration to radically transform it.
Such coping mechanisms have led and continue to lead to more and more “poetic” contradictions. The most eminent story in my mind is one I heard from a relative attending a luscious wedding in the Keserwan mountains during the civil war, while militias fought and killed each other near her house in Beirut. But we do not need to go too far in the past: minutes after the violent earthquake shook the country on February 6, people started to joke and make memes about “4 million Lebanese money exchangers becoming geological experts.”
It is difficult to see the harm in the “Lebanese” way of coping with difficulties – laughing, moving on and managing your affairs your own way (the famous expression منزبّطها). But our habits come at a cost: we try to find the easy way out in solving any problem – whether in procuring public documents through bribery, or in climbing hierarchies through personal connections. For some, existence itself has become reliant on this clientelist approach. And here lies another contradiction: a large percentage of the Lebanese population belongs to political parties supposedly invested in bringing about reform. Yet, almost all such and other institutions have become temporary lifelines, exchanging silent allegiance for a clientelist, existentialist way of living that has no outlook towards reforming the future, but instead encourages a make-do attitude with the agonizing present.
Disaster is so deeply ingrained in Lebanese history that it is perhaps impossible to change our coping and clientelist mechanisms. Perhaps, they are indeed immutable traits of the Lebanese character. Perhaps, the Lebanese individual will indeed find a way, no matter how difficult the situation, of looking after himself and finding pleasure in his pain. Whatever is the case, we at least must try to change our habits – for through our numbness to our trauma, we are buying the present with our future, and in wiggling our way around issues, we are ignoring the root causes of our problems and allowing them to grow.
Continually living in a numb dystopia will eventually wither all our hearts away, undermine all our institutions, and break all the community bonds currently holding us together, even if we do not realize it at the moment. And when we do – it may be just a bit too late.