On the (Persistent) Beauty of My Lebanese Heritage
10/21/2019
I am passionately proud of my Arab heritage, and particularly my Lebanese roots. I did not grow up in Lebanon. But I have been there nearly every year of my life to see family. That family has lived through:
- a civil war and violent foreign interference
- scheduled power brownouts (for decades) and largely inefficient public services (inefficient waste management, monopolies on utilities like telecom and fuel)
- politicians who elect themselves and give each other raises while failing to fulfill the basic social contract
- the violation of an entire coastline with private money and plastic trash
- millions of Syrian refugees flooding a country - whose infrastructure barely serves the existing Lebanese populace - to escape disappearing or death at home
That family has seen a country hijacked by other nations' aspirations to dominate the region with whatever tools might prove useful, including people's lives. See what's happening to the Kurds today, a cruel betrayal from multiple governments they once considered allies.
Whatever poor was to my parents when they first got to the US in the 70s pales against the average monthly income of ~$1000 a Lebanese college graduate might hope to achieve. No wonder so many Lebanese (mostly men) leave Lebanon to make something of themselves elsewhere. Sound familiar?
And yet, the Lebanese prove persistent. They provoke the patriarchy. They patiently prose. They passionately protest.
They do so with dignity, and cheerfulness, and wit, and a latent, boiled anger. They create poetic messages out of candle wax. They invent new slogans and rhymes in English, French, Arabic and myriad other languages so that the world understands the hypocrisy they endure, a hypocrisy felt globally.
They do so under the threat of war, economic manipulation and lack of any social contract...and with complete disregard to pausing every day life.
In that spirit, I am asking my friends and family in the US to support Lebanon simply by reading. Not Fox News pls. They are far too driven to reelect Donald Trump to cover Mid-East news objectively. RIP Shepard Smith.
Try Al Jazeera, BBC or NPR...all are covering pretty accurately relative to my family's shared pics and vids and stories from the actual demonstrations.
And feel free to ping me on this with any questions you have. If I cannot answer, I'll ask the Lebanese fam for details and context. They aren't alone over there. And we aren't alone here either