Why?

This is the day I had feared for a long time but hoped would never materialize. The images of masked young men all hyped up by the deranged and false ideologies of their leaders, all too eager to sow death and destruction, is like a recurring nightmare from years gone by. Only now, the black and white images have given way to moving images, broadcast in real time and in living color and assault your senses from every TV and computer monitor. The images are depressing, nauseating and fill me with shame and hopelessness.

The images also make me angry. I blame every last Lebanese politician who has willingly played the role of puppet, pimp and whore to one or more foreign master; every last one of them, from Berri to Jumblatt, to Gaegea, to Hariri Jr to Nasrallah, to Aoun. Their primary goal has always been self preservation and the preservation of their power and that of their narrow constituencies. None of them, despite their lofty public pronouncements, ever worked for the interest of Lebanon and the Lebanese people as a whole.

Why did it have to come to this? Why? Have they not learned a damn thing from the civil war? Perhaps if the powers that be had not behaved like the civil war was someone else’s problem and the young generation had been taught about the war in school, they would have realized the civil war’s absurdity and its devastating consequences.

Perhaps then, those masked young men would not be holding on to those Kalashnikovs with such lust, with such eagerness to finger the triggers and draw blood, the blood of their brothers and sisters.