My Heroes of Downtown Beirut
By: Joseph Hitti
February 28/ 2005
I love you, my brothers and sisters camping in downtown Beirut. My exiled eyes tear up a million times a day at your sight embracing the statue of our 1916 martyrs. For like Hariri, Jumblatt, Gemayel, Mouawwad, and all those who were killed with booby-trapped bombs instead, in the sophistication of today's butcher occupier the Assad regime of Damascus, they stood for their country and were hanged by the Ottoman occupier Jamal Pasha the Butcher. This is, unfortunately, the stuff that nations are made of.

I love you, my long forgotten friends, for leaving your religions at home, in the church or the mosque. Like all civilized people, you are proving to the world that your only religion is your country, your only faith is in yourselves as human beings and in your future, and that no creed, faith, belief or ideology will ever again bring you to the brink of despair and death. This is the stuff that democracies are made of.

I love you, my compatriots, for loving your country without hating other countries. Fascists, racists and other extremist nationalists can only love their own country by hating other peoples and nations. We ought to be much better than that. For we should define our love of country by the confidence we have in ourselves as a people, and not by how much better than others we think we are. We are not better than others. We are simply different. This is the stuff that makes us a mature democratic nation.

I love you , my fellow Lebanese, for respecting all other countries, cultures and religions, including Syria and its people. The Syrian people have been, and will always be, our friends, our relatives, our neighbors, our business partners, and we harbor no ill to them. They are as much the victims of the butchers of Damascus as you and I are, and they suffer too. Here in the US, you can wake up one morning in Boston and decide to drive or fly to New York City for a weekend. In Europe, you can get up in London and take the train for a weekend in Paris or Prague or Milan. I look forward to the day when I can wake up in Beirut and, on the whim of the moment, decide to drive or fly or take the train to Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Jerusalem or Cairo for the weekend, without the fear of secret police, the harassment of corrupt customs officers and the treachery of hostile borders. This is the stuff real neighbors are made of.

I love you, young and old, women and men, workers and doctors for proving to the world that we are a nation but that our growth as a nation is never a finished job. My generation came of age in the 1975 War that saw Lebanon disintegrate because we were not unified like you are today. We disagreed on whether we should love Lebanon more or less than the Palestinian Cause, and we took our country down to prove we were right. Let us not fool ourselves. The Syrian regime and everyone else in the neighborhood and beyond took advantage of our divisions and we are largely responsible for our predicament. In fact, many of those who have joined the opposition lately are the same people who, for personal and political gain, brought the Syrians in and the country to the abyss.

Remember that in a previous nation-building moment in the history of the country, when the National Pact of 1943 was made, the World War II generation of Lebanese defined their Lebanon as the neutralization of two negations. By negating Lebanon's two identities in the East and the West, they found a compromise that worked for a while, but which came crumbling three decades later. “Deux negations ne font pas une nation”, and today your generation should be looking for more than a Mediterranean merchants' compromise and look for a more forward-looking, pro-active defintion of who we are as a nation and as a country. In the age we live in, the Lebanese people's greatest asset is their identity as the synthesis of cultures, ethnicities and religons. Instead of rejecting East and West to define who we are, we must embrace both East and West without always thinking that one needs to dominate over the other. And in order to do that, we must take the bold step of abandoning the religious community as the unit building block of Lebanese society, and replace it with the Lebanese individual, exclusive of his or her religious identity.

I, for one, believe that as a Lebanese citizen my relationship with my country should be a direct one, and not through the intermediary of the religious denomination I belong to. My rights and obligations as a Lebanese citizen should be established directly between myself as a simple tax-paying individual and the State as my representative, provider of public services, and the protector of my safety and security. The Lebanon of 1943 was defined as a set of religious communities who divided power and privileges amongst each other, but made no pledge whatsoever of any obligation towards the country as a collective. Consequently, the Lebanon of 1943 did not provide for your or my rights and obligations as individuals, but only as members of our religious communities. As a Lebanese citizen, I have no individual rights and obligations except those that the religious leaders of my community define for me. I have no direct connection to my government or the institutions of my State, and I have to go through the church or the mosque in every aspect of my daily life. That is not the stuff of a modern nation. This is medieval, archaic, anachronistic and, in times of crisis, deadly. When Lebanon needed us in 1975, we turned to our religious communities and we betrayed our country for all these other groups. Today, we have an opportunity to change all that, so that when the next crisis comes about, we stand like you today, united by what makes us one, and not divided by what makes us many.

Last night, we, the Lebanese of New England, stood together in the snow of the storm from the night before, in the freezing evening of Boston in the middle of February, with the sub-zero howling wind blowing from the sea nearby, our faces dry, our feet frost-bitten, with our scarves, gloves, boots, hats and coats hiding our identities, our religions and our parties. Our only common denominator was the red and white colors of the ribbons, the flags and the placards. I did not know many of the people in the crowd, nor did I know their religion or their beliefs. I had no idea who were the important people and who were the ordinary people. Nor did I want to know the Moslems from the Druze from the Christians. I could not care less for the parties or the religions. I was simply enjoying the thrill of being an anonymous Lebanese nobody in a sea of anonymous Lebanese nobodys, all yelling at the top of their lungs for the freedom of their country of birth and for a life in dignity for their people back home. And for the first time in a long long time, I felt that the country of my birth is born again, like the Phoenix from its ashes, and that one day soon, I will re-discover what I knew as a child growing up in pre-war Lebanon: That the “America” we all long for has always existed in the hills of Lebanon and in the streets of Beirut, Bhamdoun, Broumana, Byblos, Baalbeck, Baakline, Tripoli, Zahle, Sidon and Tyre and every town, village and city along the coast and up and down the mountainsides. But that this “America” was buried under the boots of foreign armies, the guns of bloody domestic militias, the cannons of false peace-keepers, the knives and sniper rifles of killers, miscreants and hoodlums, the lies and back-stabs of false friends from East and West, and the betrayal of feudal lords, clergy leaders and money whales looking to consolidate their hold on power over our lives, us the ordinary Lebanese. We ough to learn those lessons. We ought to understand that the only way to avoid a repeat of the last three decades is for us, the ordinary Lebanese, to take control of our country from the hands of the medieval families who pass the leadership mantle from father to son, from the grip of the churches and the mosques who hide behind God to keep us enslaved in archaic beliefs and maintain their power over us, and from the wealthy magnates who think they can buy our dignity and our honor for a few liras. Us, the ordinary people of Lebanon, the educated and the non-educated, the workers and the doctors, the peasants and the engineers, we are really much much better than all of them, and Lebanon is ours, not theirs.

For all that, we love you, my fellow Lebanese who are camped out on Martyrs' Square in the tent city of downtown Beirut. Take us all back home. Give us back our country. Make us all proud.