When going back is moving forward

Looking back at my growing up years in Beirut, our lives evolved around tomorrow. It was fed by drama and tamed by abuse. 20 years later, things remain the same, except that the war drama is replaced by daily life dramas and violent abuse is replaced by political and substance abuse.

Why have we not changed?

“Change” had no significant meaning to me before moving to the US. I  have learned that change is this eagerness to move forward, to look beyond tomorrow, to constantly see new ways to make things better. It is this dissatisfaction with the status quo, which seems to be carried in a lot of people's DNA.

While the changes were not always the right ones with respect to say the Middle East, or even in America, change is a reality that will happen and keep happening. I wondered how I could bring this positive change culture to   Lebanon. Can we even dream of becoming agents of change?

For my Lebanon, there is an urgent need to move on. We need to however recognize that our country has been stuck in a 45-year moment, for we have been in denial all this time, living in the illusion of moving on only to be regressing.

Lebanon has literally no civil war museum. The 30-year civil war earned one paragraph in the 600 something page history schoolbook. The warlords are the modern country leaders of today. We still think of each other in terms of sects, though we don’t admit it. Civil marriage is illegal. These are few elements of a long list of realities that clearly shows that we have not dealt with our past; instead we cowardly chose to ignore it.

Hitler’s atrocities are engraved in the German history and have turned into a collective national guilt. In South Africa the pains of the Apartheid are revived at every corner of the street, engrained in the culture and faced bravely by the people of this country.
My fellow Lebanese will respond: South Africa lives in the past, we live the moment. But what a sinful moment we are stuck in.

My yoga teacher in the Bay Area would have a heart attack when she finds out what do we mean by the here and now. Whether abuse of religion, arms, drugs, alcohol, they are all the same: A constant debauchery to escape the real moment.

If we don’t recognize our past, our mistakes and our weaknesses change will not come. It is not a coincidence that negative feedback is culturally unacceptable, that people are ashamed to see therapists, and would rather live with mental illnesses a lot of them the product of decades of violence. It is not an accident that Lebanese think they are the chosen ones despite a stagnating economy and a 55 Billion-Dollar debt.

Lebanon wake up, hit the road back and deeply embrace your past 50 years.