It is sad...

I decided to write this post after reading lebanon.profile's comment below about Franz Ferdinand's appearance at the Byblos festival. For as frivolous as that comment seems, it managed to put its finger right on one essential wound. At least, my essential wound—and I suspect the lifetime dilemma of many an expatriate Lebanese. It is a dilemma of identity, of belonging, of major life choices, and many value choices. At first I hesitated to post right after the news of the bombing in Jounieh. But then I realized, this is not unrelated, nor any less important. That bombing, and all the conditions that enabled it, are the reasons people like me choose to abandon all that delight that lebanon.profile so teasingly described, and abandon things way more important than that (such a family, friends and loved ones) and decide to live abroad. And people like me are not the minority; we are the majority of the Lebanese. We outnumber those residing in Lebanon by more than three folds! How anomalous is that? And why? Is everyone just a “traitor”, a “coward”, a “sell-out”? Or is there something, still, terribly wrong with our country. I didn’t have to look any farther than lebanon.profile's profile to find my hint. “One of multiple students running Lebanese Political Journal. We are from the Bekaa, the Jounoub, and Kisirwan. We hate not being able to publish our identities, but with Syria now cracking down on newspapers we do not feel comfortable speaking openly. Also, our affiliations to different people and publications does not allow open disclosure.” How sad is that? And then it reminded me, I too write under an alias. For some reason or another, we hide behind these silly handles, behind our fears: they for living there, I for want of being able to visit there. That is the reason that people like me choose to be, according to lebanon.profile, “sitting at [our] computers next to fat North Americans eating donuts, guzzling petrol, watching Fox News, and getting excited when the new Walmart opens”. (And I have to note here, I hope unnecessarily, that this is just as accurate of a view of the people I work and live with as that of bomb-toting, beard-growing, tent-dwelling, camel-riding terrorists is of the Lebanese.) So yes, you will be “gorging [yourselves] on sun, music, celebrity, heaving and sweating beautifully tanned and heavily oiled light-brown thin voluptuous bodies swaying, thumping, and throbbing to the beats with Lebanese flags in [your] hands” while hiding behind such sad, sad masks as “lebanon.profile”. Our country leaves much to be desired. I pretend to be excited about Franz Ferdinand coming to Byblos while I didn’t bother lift a finger when they were here in Philly a couple of weeks ago. And “Coldplay, the Arcarde Fire, and tons and tons of other cool stuff”; right around the corner. It is for a reason than millions of Lebanese people have made the very difficult choice to leave the country and live, by choice, in our “bourgeois American/Canadian paradise”. And it is not for Franz Ferdinand. (And it’s not like Lebanon doesn’t boast its own even more indulgent, and by comparison far more corrupt, bourgeoisie!) My ultimate fear is that millions more, including lebanon.profile, would do the same as me if they only had the chance. I am not saying that making the decision of staying is any less difficult, and certainly I am not saying it is any less noble (I could actually argue to the contrary, in that tragic Greek concept of nobility). But I am saying that we have a lot to achieve, a lot of ground to cover, to become what we hope at best is the likeliness of a Western entity (be it Paris or Switzerland, or god forbid, New York!). So let us at least be humble about it. When our country can boast half of the respect for human dignity and civilization as such “retrograde” countries as the US do (at least in writing, at least for its own citizens), then I will be a happy man. Until then, both in your paradise/hell and mine, we remain sad, sad people…