Some shortcomings of Lebanese society.

It seems to me that in the last few posts I have become a rather literary version of a ditsy teenager "à la mean girls" complaining about life and how "so so stupid everyone is." 

If you havent thought so yet, you will after this post!

A good friend of mine once told me the whole blogging business is useless because bloggers never provide solutions, they just raise complaints. I agreed on the second part but I do not believe that it is a single person's job to create the answer, it is rather his job to launch the question and stir up the conversation. Today I will be mixing in my pot many reasons why the Lebanese society simply doesn't work. Keep in mind I love my country regardless of its wrongdoings and hope one day we can make a change.  

 1- Lebanon where women wear black for a traditionally set number of months after loosing a family member all while moving on with their lives regularly. Moving on is entirely normal and there shouldn't be a set deadline for when it is ok to listen to a song after someone has died. Grieving is personal and no one should interfere with it.

2-Lebanon where any group can burn tires and close international highways whenever they feel like it. 

 

3- Lebanon where Halloween is a big deal but independence day isn't. 

 

4- Lebanon where presidential elections depend on international consensus 

 

5- Lebanon where it is ok for men to sleep around with other women when in a relationship because you want to preserve your girlfriend for marriage. 

6- Lebanon where you can get a hymenoplasty as readily as you can order a burger  

7- Lebanon where George Clooney marrying a native gets unlimited coverage whereas the biggest Islamic mosque being closed gets near to none. 

8- Lebanon where a parliament renewing its expired mandate twice passes silently but a religious figure getting criticized leads to mayhem. 

9- Lebanon where a 3 km trip takes you an hour by car at rush hour

10- Lebanon where your skin color determines if you can swim in a private pool

11- Lebanon where yearly the first mild rain showers drain the infrastructure and claim a few souls 

12- Lebanon where the rapist can be forgiven if he offers to marry his victim 

13- Lebanon where plastic surgery loans are offered

14- Lebanon where local homosexuals get rectal dilation tests by the police while visitors thrive in gay bars 

15- Lebanon where local art is almost dead 

16- Lebanon where school history books stop at 1970

17- Lebanon where one sect's hero is another's demon 

18- Lebanon where even ISIS can find supporters 

19- Lebanon where what type of car you own takes you a longer way in society than what type of mind you have 

20- Lebanon where connections are a requirement for job security not an addition 

21- Lebanon where phone calls get you out of traffic tickets and minor felonies 

22- Lebanon where less than 5% of the parliament are women 

23- Lebanon where sharing your opinion online can get you arrested

24- Lebanon where refugees get cut in the face and European tourists get the full hospitality package 

25- Lebanon where armed civilians establish check points and close roads for "security purposes" 

 

26- Lebanon where Hamra and Tripoli experience different meanings of the term "on fire" on the same night

10 thoughts to make you Disinhibited, Disillusioned and Disenchanted in your mid 20s

I haven't written on this blog for a long time. 3.5 months to be exact. Now that happened for a reason. It is not out of lack of Lebanese events to comment on but rather out of personal disenchantment. The summer of 2014 had been very heavily embedded with existential questions and self reflections, all of which could have been shared here but they won't. I did not stop writing but I just wrote on a piece of paper for future references if I ever decide to open this very emotionally charged chapter of my life. 


Now on to today's post, 10 concepts that have made me disinhibited, disillusioned and disenchanted in my mid twenties 

1-Sex drive 

There will come a time where you find yourself desiring the other woman or actively misleading someone into thinking you love them be it for sexual needs or out of solitude. Point is, disinhibited fantasies will sting your moral sense and stain what you thought was an impeccable conscience. And here is the worst disillusioning part: guilt fades away. 

2-The devil is your friend 

Growing up you idealized your parents. Then around teenage years you probably stuck to your flawless friends. All in all, you never really saw evil in someone close to you. One major milestone was recognizing that in reality, as cliche as this is coming off, no one has absolutely pure intentions. Learn to appreciate that your family and closest friends are not always right and that a complete stranger can still be the victim of the crime your beloved claims has been committed to him/her. 

3-Xenophobia 

In a community of smaller communities like Lebanon, expect this more often than you think. You may try to go over and above with your friendliness yet some parties will remain impenetrable. Sects aggregate, social classes aggregate, even same language speakers aggregate. There will always be those who see Beirut as a street of Paris, those who mistake it for Tehran and those who are trying to turn it into New York. What all of them share is the absolute insistence that they are right and the accompanying superiority complex. 

4-Dysfunction is your gift

We all release a scream of despair about wanting to leave this dysfunctional nation, to live abroad where the grass is greener where the law is respected and where humanity is dignified. Truth is, foreign countries are not waiting for you with open arms. Visas and working conditions are more selective than ever. Besides, you are at high risk of failing to live in a world that walks by the book. You have become acquainted to dysfunction and it is your daily bread. Embrace that gift. 

5-Insecurities are ubiquitous

Growing up I always looked up to some of the more confident elements around me. For someone who often willingly shares his insecurities even on social media, I used to think they were mine alone. Time and more importantly acute stress of early adulthood showed me how often everyone had bigger irrational fears than mine buried deep down. Fear of society's judgement, fear of failure, the strive for acceptance were all issues I had processed by the first few years of college and could not even think that others still carried with them well into their twenties 

6-Karma is a myth

What comes around doesn't always go back around. People who walk parallel to the rules without getting caught may or may not go farther than those who abide by them. It's a matter of chance. In the unlucky event of having a conscience, in a country that lacks order, you will follow stringent personal standards. There comes a time when you realize the majority of the nation believes that breaking the rules is a necessary prerequisite to success and they more often than not get away with it while you gradually climb up the ethical ladder at a frustrating pace. Although that is disenchanting, I personally do not see myself changing my standards. 

7-What do you want to be when you grow up? 

That question finally starts to be answered once you're out of college. Or does it? Yes you do choose your major early on, fresh out of high school. What the high school teachers who asked you this question failed to mention is that a major is not a career. A medical doctor can be a psychiatrist, a surgeon or a dermatologist. All of which are totally unrelated career paths. Much in the same manner, business administration is not a career, it's a gateway to becoming a merchant, an employee or even a college professor.  So yes, you have a major in your mid 20s but what you do not even begin to have is the illusion of a stable career . 

8-You can't save them all

You may have gotten used to being the problem solver. The one who always knows the answers. You may have never had a situation where the solution escaped you. However as we grew older the problems grew with us and became completely out of our control. It is highly likely that by the time you are in your mid twenties you would have lost a friend to addiction, another to political corruption or watched another fade into an abusive relationship etc... In the end there isn't much you can do, you have to learn that no matter how hard you try, bad decisions need to be made by someone. How else would novelists and script writers find their muse? 

9-Failure 

 There are too many cliches here today. Then again originality is overrated and often inapplicable to broad populations. We cant have that as we all love our generalizations. One more lesson to learn by the time you're 25 is how to embrace the topography of rock bottom and what troughs to avoid if you ever want to end up living up in the mountains of success. The old young belief that the road to success is a straight ladder is quite wrong, it is rather filled with valleys and hills that may never take you as high up as your thought you'd get.  

10-Hope Vs Realism 

I might be disinhibited, disillusioned and disenchanted but that only adds to my realism rather than cynicism. Being in touch with the shortcoming of reality helps you save up your energy for the latter stages of life. As important as hope is in maintaining a healthy sanity, excess of it is just as toxic as lack of it. My mid 20s conclusion is is not a call for cynicism but rather for self-consciousness and willingness to admit the shortcomings of yourself, your entourage and your belief systems when the overwhelming reality calls for it.  

Diaries from the city of bombs

This blog started with a post about Beirut bombings and now we sadly revisit that notion. In the first post, we walked through a guide of what to do post bombings. Back then, most of the bombings were concentrated in suburbs or in regions far far away from Beirut. In places I had drove by once or twice at best. Granted, there was one main blast in the heart of the capital yet that was a political assassination and not just a random act of violence. Today, the random bombs have reached Raouche, an area I drive by every other day. Granted, from a geopolitical perspective, this bomb was probably never meant to go off in that area but this does not undermine that terrorists are here, they have come from all over the Arab world and are living in the small Beirut hotels/hostels. This might seem absurd to you how one bomb can be different from another one. I am not justifying political assassinations; I am just arguing that I can understand how someone would infuriate the intolerant offenders so much that they decide to take him/her out. Yet the random bombings just for the sake of killing random civilians are new to the heart of the capital.   

In the light of this eminent situation, I have decided to write something I have never before succeeded in writing. Dear readers, I have tried multiple times to have a diary as a teenager but have failed miserably mostly due to my unwillingness to share my deep thoughts even on paper. Now, I give you my latest attempt but with a very da3eish (ISIS) twist, a rather collectivistic and not so personal attempt at writing "Diaries from the city of bombs".

How does it feel to wake up in Beirut in the early days of Summer2014? It is a highly inconvenient nightmare. The water is running low because of the unusually scarce rainy season, power cuts are regular as usual and the heat and humidity are just the cherry on top. You might also want to add the random threat of dying by the hands of a suicide bomber seeking mermaids and heaven and asking for your soul as the key to the kingdom of god. 

In 2014 Beirut, you wake up, take public transport means to work and suffer the second hand smoking and lack of time respect. The alternative is taking your own car, venturing into the deadly roads filled with over stressed drivers in the midst of virtually non-existing road safety measures. You make it to your workplace, a job you probably stay in only till a better opportunity to live abroad comes along. In fact, if you live in Beirut, chances are you are always looking for a way out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a lack of patriotism, as a matter of fact, when it comes to national arrogance no one does it better than the Lebanese. It is rather a sad fact that to afford the extravagant Lebanese mode de vie, one has to make salaries that are most often not compatible with the Lebanese economy. Why do I mention this here? Because we are a population that is going over and above to try and train in Europe and the USA only to find a competitive job near home in the Arab gulf region. Yet, we find ourselves superior to those regions where terrorism nests grow… Can you sense the irony? You should because I was not trying to be subtle.

What do you do at work in 2014 Beirut? Well that varies for everyone of course. However, I think the most consistent activity would be words sharing. Yes, we Lebanese like our gossip, our political analysis, our speculations and our pessimism. We either discuss the doomed political situation in Irak and Syria and the fear of it spreading here, or we simply talk about the ridiculous notion of having no president of the republic, or share the totally inaccurate stories of how last night’s bombing played out, how many more cars are there, how is the state so confident about the number of rigged cars left etc… These topics are not new at all to Lebanon, yet what makes June 2014 special is the addition of the world cup to the discussion panel. You see major news networks are overwhelmed with groundbreaking facts to report. They report a football goal from here and an increase in the casualties of the bomb attacks from there with both reports being minutes apart. All is well, Life is good, and it’s great to live in Lebanon in the summer of 2014. You would imagine our country holds on to its identity with all of this going on. Let’s take a look at the streets of Beirut shall we? They are full of hanging flags, yet none of them are Lebanese. The major football giants are all represented (Germany, Brazil, Spain, Italy etc…). To be fair, our home team has never made it to the play offs but the Beirut cynicism within me tells me even if it did, the flags would not change. On that cynicism, you will rarely find a inhabitant of Beirut who does not suffer from some form of anxiety or stress related condition. Yet if you ever attempt to undermine the greatness of this city, you’ve got it coming to you. The Lebanese patriotism is a weird ghost, it only comes out when foreigners speak of Beirut, it never shows up around Lebanese people. It also seems to take a step back when we are talking to Europeans, as if we have an inferiority complex of some sort. Since the world revolves around the world cup, I’m sure it must be because Europeans have such good football teams.

Now let us forget the inferiority complexes of Lebanon and move to the last part of a 2014 Beirut summer day.

Beirut, the city of bombs by night… what a scary notion right? Wrong! We are renowned for our night life. Our clubs and bars are unmatched all over the world. We party every night even if the bombs rocked our ground by day, we consider it part of the show and dance to the rumbling of the earth beneath our feet. Well… to those who still take pride in that, I ask them to take a walk along Hamra or Bliss street in the past week after the bombings. I think it has finally happened, Beirut is drained. We are tired, we are suffocating. This is not a message of hope or of Lebanese supremacy. This is a message of fear and instability. Beirut is a phoenix, it was destroyed then rose from the ashes 7 times. These are all great titles, but I really do not want to be there for the 8^th resurrection if I can somewhat help prevent the 8^th destruction. Yet how can we do that dear Diary?    

Hospital moments that reshaped my view of humanity.

A few days ago, I finished my third year of medical school. That year was also my first fully clinical year i.e. I spent all of it on hospital grounds. Physicians are often put in situations that challenge their humane side. I have probably learned more by passing on the hospital floors about humanity than I have in the past 24 years where I amassed friends, enemies and idols. I have learned much more about the value of a life than in all the humanity courses combined. I have learned even more about the absurdity of it than from reading Sartre, Camus and Ionesco. Looking back on these 12 months, I wanted to note down some of the most intense moments:

 -Seeing my first embryo on ultrasound and having it turn out to be dead.
All the arguments I have had pro or against choice suddenly became irrelevant. I am a deep believer in the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy but standing there, I had to admit, it did not feel right at all. I still think however that if she could go through with it, it is her choice but unlike what I had previously thought, I would think twice if I am ever in a condition where the fetus has half my chromosomes.   

-Diagnosing a 3 year old kid with advanced cardiomyopathy requiring transplant.
Looking at the confusion in the father’s eyes as the doctor begins to explain to us in a not so discrete tone how this child is destined to die if he does not get a transplant.  

- Hearing the inspiring recovery story of a drug addict my age.
This has by far been the most inspiring moment of my medical path so far. It is both destabilizing and reassuring to see a young man take control of his life and turn an extremely horrible situation into a success story.   

- Carefully approaching the parents of a possible abuse victim.
How can you explain to parents that it is very likely someone close to them has sexually abused their daughter when she was barely 5 years old without reconsidering the value of humanity. 

- Soothing a young girl after learning she got her infection from the man she thought she loved.
Imagine her crying as you told her that he caught this from someone else and transferred it to her when she thought he was faithful.

-Seeing and smelling the blood of a teenage trauma victim as it sprays all over your white coat, and ultimately losing that patient.  

- Meeting uneducated empowered women who overcame more adversity than you can imagine and argued about feminism, equality and metaphysics without having read about it in a book

 -Watching the truth being hidden from a man with cancer and vaguely answering his questions when he asserts you're his favorite part of the medical team. What can you do in a society that refuses honesty and claims it is in the greater benefit of the patient?

-Gazing into the eyes of a paralyzed speechless man as he moaned begging not to be fed by a tube. How much is left of you if you can no longer express yourself? You’re just a consciousness stuck in its place, incapable of drifting away as those around you forget who you were.  

- Hearing the screams of a patient with cancer in the bone. Never will I forget the plead for help as I stood there speechless after all the possible pain medication given was in vain.

  

- Trying to understand how the patient who makes perfect sense at day, deeply cuts herself with any available item at night. Mental illness is not a joke to be fiddled with. It is a very frightening notion not to be able to control the full spectrum of your emotions.   

- Watching daughters instantaneously shift from pleasant polite ladies to irrational, shouting insane women when talking to you about the well being of their dying mother. I think this is my closest encounter with the pure form of what they call love.

- The intense fear when finding similarities between my life and the story of a schizophrenic patient.

Beirut Vs. Change

Today I actually decided to post my original first piece. I had planed on using the following text as the first post for my blog. Yet misfortune happened and a significant bombing occurred that day which is how my first article “A guide to Beirut bombings” came to be. Before reading this piece you should keep in mind that I wrote it while in my psychiatry rotation and I was in a rather different mindset than today since so much has changed in the last 5 months, much more than I can describe by typing on my laptop.

While I was passing through the psychiatry rotation in my training as a physician I often came across humans in their weakest or strongest states. I was amazed to meet humanity in its outmost will power, its weakest downfalls and its painless dissociation. It's not that I am coming from a absolutely sane background, as a matter of fact my network of family and friends has in itself a big spectrum of dysfunction but what lacks is the distance I need to objectively appreciate what I'm seeing.

Splitting from reality is an intimidating notion isn't it? What If your reality was too cruel to live in? Would you take schizophrenia over reality? Of course not! Right? Well tell me, what's your definition of reality? Is life about the outings? The money? The job? The Good sex? The friends? The children? The family? Why is your life worth admiring and that of a schizophrenic pitiful?

In a nutshell schizophrenia is an organic disorder of thought where patients lose touch with reality, hallucinate and develop bizarre fixed beliefs ranging from magical thinking to absolute nonsense. They are often so convinced of their speech that you are inclined to consider if it is true or not. Imagine the horror when in the midst of his delusions, a schizophrenic patient reminded you of your own life and struggles and you are left with a scary notion: am I going to change my thinking process or will I one day split from this reality and have the life I always wanted to live, believe the things I always wanted to believe in at the cheap cost of having all of this only inside my mind.

The code of confidentiality keeps me from going into any details but it all started when one patient rightfully evoking his struggles seemed to mirror a recent debate that had been raging in my mind, the dilemma of change. Just like schizophrenics, we tend to rationalize change in the weirdest way possible.

There comes a time where you look around you and realize the people are not the same, the room is a new one, the weather is milder and you are trying to convince yourself you have not changed. Do me a favor, grab a mirror and look in it to see if you could name the person in the reflection.

Living in Beirut, one comes to realize escape is not an easy option. You can rarely

drop your past and start over. Off the top of my head, I can list two reasons for that: one is that the city’s too small to completely change scenery and two is that the culture is too meddling to just let you be. Here’s a fact, in Lebanon, it is not uncommon to still be extensively in contact with the same set of people you grew up with. After all, half the population lives in an area as big a one or two districts of Paris. If you’re wondering, Paris has 20 districts.

I personally love to study people. It is possibly one of the many reasons why psychiatry is high on my list of possible specialties after I finish my training in medicine. I liked to observe and analyze the behavior of friends, family and even acquaintances ever since I can remember. In that process, I came across many ways residents of Beirut have embraced or at least tried to embrace change. I personally have gone over many transformations, tried many approaches as I eventually came full circle. I think I realized why most of our youth resort to immigration. Yes it is true that finances are the leading cause for people to leave, nonetheless, it seems traveling is a corner stone in the development of every Lebanese youngster. We travel because we are suffocated by the small space and smaller circles of society. The chains of the Lebanese community tighten further as you grow up till you realize, like I have, that escape is inevitable unless you want to become another pawn in the sectarian corrupt community. It so happens that you find yourself changing from within, your mind shedding its older notions and preconceptions but the city around you seems to be more resilient, after all, it is too small to accommodate the changing whims of all its inhabitants. This is when a good proportion of its citizens become entrapped by the will of the majority and changing that reality is hardly possible without extreme turmoil and resistance from the masses.     

That identification with the schizophrenic happened a couple of times already in the past few weeks and it got me thinking, why am I finding common grounds with someone whose feet haven’t touched the land of reality since the 90s? It’s probably because if I don’t get the chance to free my mind from Beirut’s preconceived notions of what life should be, I too will turn the outside world into my own personal view of reality.

الثالث عشر من نيسان

كنت قد قررت من مدة أن أحاول الكتابة بالعربية. حاولت أن ادون بعض الجمل ولكنني فشلت. وجدت جملي ركيكة وتمكني من اللغة أضعف من ما كان في أيام الدراسة. ولكن اليوم لا أظن أنا بإمكاني الكتابة عن هذا الموضوع إلا بالعربية. لذلك أرجو منكم أن تعدروا هشاشة أسلوبي في بعض الأماكن..

اتعرفون ما هو تاريخ اليوم؟ انه الثالث عشر من نيسان. و لمن يجهل هذا التاريخ، ارجو منه ان يراجع ذاكرته بما يخص الباصات. انا شخصياً اعرف باصين: باص المدرسة و بوسطة عين الرمانة.

باص مدرستي مليءٌ بأخبار وذكريات سعيدة وغريبة كونت ما هي عليه شخصيتي اليوم. لكننا لنا نناقشه طبعاً، بإمكانكم أن تقروأ باقي المدونة إن اردتم التعرف على من أكون لأن ذاك باص كان من أهم العنا صر المكونة لشخصي. لكنني أذكره اليوم لسببٍ أخر، فعندما كنت صغيراً كنا نقطن في الضاحية وتحديداً في الشياح. وكان باص مدرستي يمر من طريق صيدا القديمة الذي كان يعرف سابقاً بخط تماس الشياح-عين الرمانه. ككل لبناني كبر في جيل ما بعد الحرب كنت أدرك أنا هنالك حقبة زمنية عرفت بالأحداث مرى بها أهلي وجدتي وأعممتي وأخوالي ولكنني لم أعرف أكثر من أنها كانت فترة تقارب للعائلة حيث إنتقلت عاءلة ابي للعيش في منطقة مختلفة كل سنة وكانت عندهم أطرف القصص عن تلك الأيام من جهة اخرى كنت أسمع من أمي فقدانها إبن العم هذا أو ذاك وأذكر مثلاً كيف كانت جدتي تحكي عن جارها الذي أردي برصاص القناص على شرفة بيتها ولذلك لا يزال الدرابزين مثقوباً من تلك الطلقة. لكن عقلي الصغير لم يحلل ويتخيل هذه القصص. لا بل تخيلت أنها كانت أياماً صعبة ولكن لم تكن خطرة فلم يمت أي من أهلي أو اخوانهم.

ومرت الأيام وكبرت قليلاً، انتقلنا إلى الطيونه لكن كنت لا أزل اركب الباص ذاته. وتعلمت أن بوسطة عين الرمانة كانت سبب إندلاع الحرب الأهلية، فأصبح مرورنا بالقرب من تلك المنطقة مصدر تعجب لي. خاصةً وأن أمي كانت تقطن هنالك قبل الحرب فكيف يمكن لمنطقة قريبة إلى هذا الحد، أزورها كل ما قصد أهلي اصدقاءهم المسحين في زيارة أن تكون مصدراً للحرب التي دامت سنوات. هنالك مثلٌ لبناني يقول: "القصة مش قصة رمانة، القصة قصة قلوب مليانة". أحب هذه العبارة فهي تختصر الكثير عن لبنان وثقافة النسيان والتحوير. نحن شعبٌ يرفض الحقيقة والصراحة ويعيش في بطولات وهمية وأفلام من نسج خيال عاصي ومنصور و غيرهم. نحن شعبٌ يرفض الاعتراف ببشاعة ماضيه. نتغنى بزيارة فنانين غربين لأرضنا ويموت ممثلينا على أبواب المستشفيات. نحن شعبٌ يصفق لكل من تشبه بالغرب أو دافع عن العروبة وننسى أن نتذكر ذكرى حربنا الأهلية. 

اعتبر نفسي انسان شبه مطلع. لكن لماذا لا أعرف سوى أكثر بقليلٍ جداً عن ما كان يعرفه علي إبن العشر سنوات في باص مدرسته؟ لماذا لا أعرف حتى اليوم من وماذا ولماذا تدمرت بيروث؟ لماذا لا أعرف  أسماء المعارك الكبرى؟ لماذا أعرف كل تفصيلٍ عن فخرالدين وزنوبيا واليسار ولا أعرف شيئاً عن زعماء الحرب وملوك الطوائف؟ أين نحن من كتب التاريخ التي تنتهي في الخمسينات؟ هل إنتهى الزمن مع حلف بغداد؟ نحن وطنٌ لا يزال في حالة حرب. نحن شعبٌ لم يتصالح مع نفسه ومعظم شبابه غير أبه وكباره يريدون النسيان فقط. تعلموا من الغرب كيف نناقش تاريخنا قبل المسامحة. كيف نشرح و نفصل جرائم الحرب ونعاقب ونحاسب ثم تلتئم جراحنا ونتخطى. أعتذر انني قطعت هذا المقال باكراً لكنني في النهاية تلميذ طب قد ضاع يومه كاملاً في نحيب حربٍ لم يعرفها وغداً يوم عمل عادي. لا تستحق الحرب الأهلية أن تذكر فهي لم تنتهي.