Beirut Report XV

Barring any unforeseen changes in plans (like being turned back at the Syrian border), this will be the last Beirut Report. We wrapped up the class today with an informal half-class, and then joined the High Intermediate class to watch "In The Shadow of the City", a Beirut war-time movie with a palatable plot and excellent footage. It's really hard to comprehend that when I was born this city was occupied by Israelis, and when I was growing up it was divided into two warring sides. Now it's peaceful, as cities go, and even with bullet holes all over the place it's difficult to imagine a fifteen-year war happening in this place. People are willing to talk politics and history here, but mostly the adults. Political debate is alive and well - the country is on the verge of economic crisis, everybody knows it, and a lot of people don't think the Hariri-Lahoud government can pull the strings to save the country. Young people don't talk war or politics much, they look only to the present; the past was awful, the future is scary. In the forty-three days I've been here I've watched the city, as well as the villages where I've been, and I've tried to understand the national psyche at least a little bit. How does a country cope with a horrific, generation-long civil war that ultimately failed to resolve the economic discrepencies it was started over?

A lot of people - the excellent film "West Beirut", for instance - like to blame it on outsiders. "The regional drama was played out on the stage of Lebanon", I've heard. Sure, regional rivalries - Israel v. PLO and Israel v. Syria - were played out here, but that's not what divided the Lebanese into splintering, sectarian factions. Christians especially, as well as Sunnis, don't like to face the reality of economic disparity along sectarian lines, both in 1975 and (more troublingly) now. People seem to get along now, and I honestly think that most of the nation understands that there were just too many wrongs perpetrated during the war to try and rectify each; there has been a national amnesty of sorts, or at least it seems that way on the surface.
-- my apologies, the rest of this post was killed by Blogger/AUB and I don't have the time to rewrite it... it wasn't very well-thought-out anyway, so don't lose sleep over it.