The Lebanese have the same relationship with the coronavirus pandemic as the other inhabitants of the planet. It is an extremely dangerous threat that the world has no intellectual or analytical control over it so far. The question about its origins remains, and the speculation it has raised about the world, medicine and death adds, in the eyes of some, to its obscurity. As for its catastrophic economic implications and their potential political ramifications, they are many and very worrying. The feeling that it had been contained, which was backed up by the figures, was swiftly erased by the Omicron variant that has raised hopelessness that we can defeat it very high and left many echoing a new phrase: we might end up living with it forever.
There is, then, something that resembles a devastating natural act that offends humans’ capacities, or that is how many see it. Let us read some of the descriptions of Omicron that reinforce this bleak view: according to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, it is the most contagious and transmissible of the COVID-19 variants. According to the health ministers of the G7 countries, it is the biggest health threat facing our world today. US President Joe Biden has said it would begin to spread much faster in the United States, while the WHO has also found that it spreads at a rate not seen in any of the previous variants.
This term, “variant,” is a concept similar to those used in wars to indicate the difficulty of the battle against the enemy: the research labs, as the arms manufacturers in these wars, cannot monitor its movements and identify its location. It conceals more than it reveals. It resides behind boulders or underground and attacks those waiting for it in the opposing trenches when they least expect it. It is like ‘the night that I can’t escape,’ as the Arab pre-Islamic poet Nabigha al-Dhubyani famously put it while he had been fleeing from Al-Numan, the King of Hirah, and had no hope his escape would succeed.
The feeling that the war will not end with a victory is brutal for the fighter. More brutal is a growing conviction that there is no salvation. Indeed, those who have promised salvation throughout history would say that they control how things would develop, nature included. The absence of salvation we are seeing today declares the absence of control, any control. Extreme humility and sobriety have replaced sweeping pretentious claims.
In addition to this, however, the Lebanese face two additional problems in which the lack of control appears in its clearest form. First, the dollar, which is flying high without the vast majority of the country’s people understanding why. Only three years ago, the dollar seemed docile, and increasing numbers of Lebanese seemed capable of owning, moving and controlling it. Today, the numbers are rising and purchasing power is declining in line with the inflated numbers.
The dollar also shocks and startles, and it kills as well, through starvation and disease for which medicine cannot be obtained. Despite that, it surges as though there is no escaping its devastating attack while the pathetic, wretched political authorities do nothing to stop it. Some solemn reports that have said things will not change, if they ever do, until many years from now, boost the most despairing views. Moreover, if medicine increases COVID-19 and Omicron’s obscurity, here, another unpopular science, economics, does the mystifying.
Some of us fall into the illusion of having control over what happens by directing warranted expletives at politicians and businessmen which they deserve. A smaller segment might remember what the Nasserist era taught us about “the agents of dollars” and that the dollar being damned in principle. However, neither this nor that will stop the green currency “coming at us out of nowhere.”
Hezbollah is another thing unique to the Lebanese that defies perception. True, we have been living with this bizarre entity for forty years, but the passage of time has not made it any less bizarre or defiant of reasoning.
Imagine: a party stronger than the state, an army stronger than the state’s army, and the specter of widespread death in pursuit of (?) the liberation of the Shebaa Farms, the identity of which is confused. Imagine also Iranian influence crossing Iraq and Syria to settle down with us, and Lebanese, citizens of a country of no more than five million, are sent to “liberate” Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen … On top of all that, it does not seem, regarding this bizarreness, that an end will come soon.
The people of Syria and Iraq came to know ISIS a few years ago. Overnight, it established a caliphate, united chunks of the two countries, put swords to the peoples’ necks, and enslaved women. It is not yet clear that it has become a thing of the past, and who knows, it may be our fate, in this part of the world, to be controlled by forces that cannot be fathomed but can do everything else.
