Meek Like Sheep

Pick you demo, Riemer said. In this country of ultimate diversity, where you can ski in the mountains and and swim in the sea both on the same day (though not very likely), you can also demonstrate for and against on the same day.

Pro-Hariri demonstrators (top) with sexy umbrellas, and pro Hezbollah demonstrators (bottom) with all kinds of umbrellas, ranging from pink to black to techni-color. They do not look so different, do they?

I did both manifestations. That's the privelege of the press (story in Dutch can be read here). Traffic was not as bad as they promised it to be. Security was mild. And the overall situation was not tense at all, unlike what just about every news agency said it would be. Wet it was. Very wet. But not tense. Maybe a little grim. And a little sad.

If you are a Lebanese, I can understand that these are strange and unsettling times, to put it mildly. All sides are openly preaching war now, and it seems inevitable that this is what is going to happen in the end.

For a foreigner, it is a strange phenomenon. That an entire people sees war approaching, but that somehow they all think that there is nothing they can do about it, that it is an inescapable thing, inevitable.

What causes a people to sit so passively, waiting to be led to the slaughter bench by outside forces (whatever outside forces these may be, I’m not choosing sides) like sheep? In education there is the occurrence of ‘learned helplessness’. Children can be taught to be helpless, and thus will not do anything to help themselves, because their experience is that they are incapable of doing so, so why bother trying?

A cultural anthropologist I was talking to felt that people are so busy with preparing for a war, that psychologically they would not even be able to avoid a war, even if they had the power to do so. “You cannot at the same time want to prevent a war and prepare for one,” she said. It is not altogether a new phenomenon.

The first world war, which sort of announced itself in a matter days, was a similar event. Even though all powers realized that the steps they took would inevitably lead to a war, they somehow were no longer in control to stop this process, even though they did understand that war was not a desirable thing.

The Jews, during the run-up to WWII, in Germany, were presented on an almost daily basis with less and less options, and more and more restrictions. It was clear that eventually they’d be left with nothing. And even when they were rounded up, and put in trains to concentration camp, there do not seem to have been many incidents of full scale refusal or opposition.

Meek is the word that comes to mind when I think of the current situation. All sides preach war, and here we all sit, meekly, like sheep.

It is an odd thing, and I am curious as to how Lebanese look at the current situation.

Ladies in black. Coco Chanel would have liked that.
Never having to worry in the morning; what shall I wear today?Hariri got himself a statue close to the spot where he died/was blown up. An 'eternal flame' was revealed as well, but I am afraid that one is of too poor a taste to publish here.The Hezbollah boys get in action. 1096 days ago. Its' been a rough ride, to say the least. For all sides.

Everyone was taking pictures of Hariri (see the cell phones?). Very similar of what happened when the coffin of Imad Mughniye passed by. The Hezbollah manifestation. Imad Mughniye's dad is the gentleman in between the sjeikhs (the men with turbans).