Pen Thoughts

Rot and Renewal, week nine. What I concluded about organisations in January 2020, and what six years did to that conclusion. The road to Riad el Solh The uprising began on the evening of 17 October 2019, after the government announced it would tax petrol, tobacco and WhatsApp calls. I wanted to go that first night. My wife Jihane asked me not to, and I stayed home. By the second evening staying home was not possible. I apologised to her and took the car, a Jeep Liberty assigned to me by the organisation I worked for, which turned out to be the right vehicle for that road. I had never seen my own city look like that. Rubbish containers burning in the middle of the carriageway. Roadblocks every few hundred metres. The smell of fire and burnt tyres. Darkness, because the power was cut, so the only light came from whatever was alight. I drove at walking pace, bumping over rocks and shredded tyres and whatever else angry people had dragged into the road. There were people standing on b...

  Rot and Renewal. Twenty years in this sector, and a question nobody at the table wanted. The table was the first thing I noticed. One slab of wood, beautifully made, longer than my office. The chairs were hydraulic, with a lever under the seat so you could raise or lower yourself, and I remember thinking I would like one of those for my desk. Then I thought the table had probably cost more than I earn in a year. Then I decided to stop thinking about the table. This was a sector coordination meeting on livelihoods and social stability. Thirty or so project coordinators, sector leads, a few technical advisers. Everyone spoke English. Not because English was anyone's first language, but because it was the only way to be certain that no international colleague present was excluded from the conversation. I have sat in dozens of these meetings over the years. I have never once heard the reverse consideration raised. When my turn came, I said something I thought was ordinary. I said tha...

  At 6:06 in the evening on August 4, 2020, I was in my office, streaming a stand-up special while I worked through some financial paperwork. An unremarkable afternoon, the kind Beirut teaches you to treasure precisely because nothing is happening in it. Then the room shook. First like an earthquake. Then harder, until the walls themselves were drumming. I heard what sounded like aircraft. In Lebanon, that sound has never meant panic; we grow up hearing jets break the sound barrier over our heads, and we learn, the way you learn anything you cannot control, to keep working through it. That is what pacification actually feels like from the inside: a sound that should stop your heart, filed instead under background noise. This one did not stay background noise for long. I ran to the window and saw a white cloud rising over the port. Before I could work out what it was, I heard the real sound. The second one. I watched a shape climb into the sky that some part of me recognized be...

Written by Oswaldo De Rivero From the book:  The Myth of Development The non-viable economies of the 21st century "The social exclusion of human beings is not the same thing as the natural depredation occurring in a food chain, where one animal species preys on another species, as is the case with lions and zebras. The human groups that are preyed upon are not from a different species, and do not always behave like zebras. A human group that feels permanently excluded from the bare necessities of existence, preyed on by the market and by modernity, will finally turn upon its predators, resorting to varied forms of treatment ranging from delinquency to terrorist fanaticism." "The law of the jungle cannot continue to be applied among men without serious consequences for the whole community. Our genes, which are programmed for survival in society, begin to protest that we are being excluded, that our family or social group is in danger. Then, when we reach ...

Lebanese people have to voice the truth that have been studiously avoided since before the beginning of the civil war in 1975. It is clear that through voicing the truth, we will run the risk of causing deep discomfort and we will definitely injure false patriotic sentiments, which have only served to mask the historic dysfunction of our nation.   But it is a necessary reflection, a vital and essential one in a country that have wasted the entire twentieth century without achieving an identity, a viable economy and a developed regime. The process of development in Lebanon is still elusive in the present global chaos, regional uprising and national parallelisms. This illusion of development has to be replaced by a realistic pact for national survival

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