Beirut, October 19th

What a nauseating day. It starts with the trail of messages asking if family and friends in Lebanon are OK. Then awareness hits you that something serious, very serious must have happened. The news pierces your screen like a knife would your heart, sharp and painfully: a massive explosion in the heart of Achrafieh. You pause. Achrafieh? Of course, your undeniable love/hate relationship with Lebanon stretches equally throughout the country’s10000 kilometer square plus, but this bittersweet district you regard with special affinity: your grandmother’s house, your highschool, your independence… your first nightclub, your cafes, your first boyfriend’s house, your mall, your hairdresser, your first car accident (well, you like to say the car was parked…), your civic awakening… demonstrating as a teenager against occupying forces… Wait, weren’t you there just a couple of weeks ago cursing at the traffic at the peak of rush hour. You look at your watch. 2h46pm in Beirut. Rush hour. It suddenly becomes too personal. It suddenly becomes a massive explosion in the heart of You. Apprehension settles as you imagine the line of dreadful scenarios: your mother going to run errands, your father on his way out of the office, cousins, uncles, relatives, friends all of whom work or live in a 100 meter vicinity of the scene. Obviously you try the phone lines and the networks are all blocked by the call congestion. Like a broken record of your most loathed songs set on replay you resonate to the bitter tempo of past assassination attempts and bombings that took place in a not so distant part of your memories… on one occasion too many… That’s when the real disgust comes in; the frightening realization that this situation is dangerously too familiar. Even more so when a colleague in London asks you: “with everything going on in Syria, wasn’t it about time?”. NO your soul rages. It was most definitely NOT about time. Lebanon like many nations has in the past yielded to the pressure of wars as it avoided its more profound adaptive challenges. Achrafieh in itself has once been shelled continuously for a hundred relentless days. It is difficult to speak on behalf of our mediocre political class although one must admit they have displayed some effort to resist drawing us into the heated neighbouring conflicts. But if the social media sphere is by any means a proxy for a Lebanese referendum on what direction the country ought to take, then the people have spoken. We understand way too personally the dreadful consequences of conflict now more than ever and it is NOT a path we wish to undertake. We refuse to let these coward acts enter any repertoire of our normality and refuse to let horror define any aspect of our identity. My thoughts and prayers go out to General Wissam al-Hassan and the innocent people who lost their lives on October 19th. General Wissam al-Hassan is a true compatriot who shined, upholding his civic duties and genuinely working to shield the country from harm. On a personal level, my admiration goes out to my friends and family whose offices were devastated by the bombing, who had to escape through pieces of shattered glass, who drove into a cloud of black smoke just as the bomb detonated and who are counting their blessing for being alive, those who braved the rubbles to pick up their children from the day-care centre across the road, those whose stores were destroyed but who are stoically cleaning-up the debris as we speak to open tomorrow morning. Most importantly my unconditional love goes to the citizens of Lebanon whose resilience and determination is stronger than any act of cowardice seeking to pull them into a conflict that we have no need, desire nor interest of even remotely entertaining.