So many essential reforms to be done in Lebanon. Where to start?

Posted by: adonis49 on: October 13, 2017

• In: Essays | Events/Cultural/Educational/Arts | Lebanon/Middle East/Near East/Levant | social articles
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So many essential reforms to be done in Lebanon. Where to start?

Hanane Kai posted on FB Yesterday at 7:32pm · 

I can’t wait for the new generation of artists, performers, directors to start producing work that tackle our current problems and challenges in this country.

I understand that civil war is something one cannot just forget (after 33 years), it’s traumatic, it’s loosing your loved ones, and having to kill to save them. It’s living in fear, and it’s being alive today by pure chance.

That said, we’re facing different problems and challenges today. Here’s a list of what I feel we should talk about, instead of war:

The garbage crisis to start with. (Never solved or resolved and becoming a calamity)

The fact that the whole country is becoming a city. Antelias was actually a village not long ago. My village, which is pretty far from Beirut, is now a city (and I still call it my village

How much kids are spoiled these days. How little time parents spend with their children, thanks to the underpaid domestic migrant workers.

Domestic migrant workers, oh… that’s a whole world of problems and challenges. (Suicide, assassinating family members, fleeing to bordellos…)

Political corruption. Homophobia. Patriarchy, where in our most progressive societies, women are still expected to prepare dinner to their husbands although they both have day jobs.

Christians and Muslims still referring to each other as us and them.

Syrian being still looked down upon: we have banners in some villages announcing the illegality of migrant workers to walk on the streets after 7pm.

Public transport. Sexual harassment in public transport.

Unprofessional behaviors. Mediocrity (this one should be on top of the list for me). And mendicant little kids

Homelessness, something we almost didn’t see in Beirut a couple of years back.

Overpopulation. Traffic. Pollution. The lack of urban planing.

The stigma of divorce. The stigma of mental sickness. Backwardness.

The normalization of plastic looking women. The pathetic standard of local series…

There you go. My list of subjects, other than war, that I would like to see addressed in a play, dance performance, movie, exhibition, book.

And that’s not even an exhaustive list.

Other people commented

Lebanese women not being able to travel alone with their children without the father’s permission.

Lebanese women not able to pass on their nationality to their children.

Lebanese women not getting custody for their children after divorce.

Personal status laws for different sects instead of one civil law that gives us all the same rights.

You forgot the new set of taxes that still adopt Stamps (Mireh), high level of indirect taxes, our currency linked to the $ and hampering our economy, the sustained increase of our sovereign debt in order to make banks richer at our expense by transacting T-Bills, tradition of finding someone in the village to pay allegiance to and be servile in our behaviors…

The financial banks in Lebanon want the 2 million Syrian refugees to stay for as long as it is possible: the foreign financial aids keep the currency “stable”.

This linkage to the $ is costing us an arm and a leg and hampering our economy.

Note: All our militia leaders during the civil war are in power and in charge of our “destiny”, and they claim there were no Victors.

Tags: adonis49, currency, Hanane Kai, Militia Leaders, personal status laws, Syrian refugees