Lebanon: Defeats should not define us.

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly based on a Hussein Hajj quote

Yesterday on Linkedin Tahaab Rais posted about a man who was writing his own headlines instead of reading the depressing ones in the press. Things like "husband loves wife today". You can read the post here. Now this has been a strange weekend for me. Not my usual deep-thinking mode. More like thoughts passing through my head as I was reading. And I added a reply to Tahaab's post. Here it is verbatim: "being in Lebanon is not exactly an easy thing these days. I thought: OK, I lost an enormous amount of money at the bank, electricity comes in batches of 2 hours a day, I have not had any serious work since (I am afraid to think since when!). Meat, water, power all of them rationed. And still - I am able to care for my elderly mother (at 86 is it not a picnic), a friend just gifted me 5 boxes of impossible-to-find meds of hers, I am still able to pay the bills (again, no mean feat!), I live in a beautiful house (I actually almost single-handedly restored in 2003), and I inherited around 1000 books from a British journalist who had to be medically evacuated from Lebanon (which I read when the power is down and summer light still up!). All this to say, OK, the world is bleak right now (specifically in a place like Lebanon), but am pulling through (certainly not easily). That old man is correct - 2020 should not define us, Defeats should not define us as well. The world goes on, so do we."

And so here we are - who would have thought I would be putting a positive spin on what happened? But - again - I can lament as much as I can about what happened, my generosity included. But this will not change things. Or the outcomes. Without any doubt, this was a case of trial by fire - not just for me - but for the whole Lebanese population. Still, it was a perfect storm as I called it earlier, with each element just feeding the others. But again, onwards and upwards.

Defeats should not define us. But that one hell of a defeat.

A trick on how to survive 2020

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly

Am going to start this post with an admission: I have had it with my European friends and their first world problems. Only yesterday a friend in Vienna was complaining that he had to show his ID at the border and answer questions as to why he was travelling. I wanted to tell him about how last time, after grueling bureaucracy I got my work visa to Europe only to be put in a glass chamber in front of all the airport for no reason at all for 45 minutes. But honestly, what is the point? 

Europeans have no clue how bad 2020 is for Lebanese people. It is exponentially bad. I have called it before, the "perfect storm" (whereas I was talking about the advertising sector, same can apply to the country at large). 

Capital controls? Check. Political meltdown? Check. Devastating explosion? Covid-19? Unemployment? Poverty? Check, check, check. The list is astronomically long. And all elements in it feed on one another. I spoke to someone the other day, and he asked me if the Dollar was going to go back to 1500 Liras. I tried to make him understand that we are currently paying that peg with the current crisis. His brother was certain that we were going to get money - as in huge quantities of money - from Europeans, particularly France. I did not have the heart to poke his dream. And again, the more you talk to people the more fallacies you hear, and the more the scenarios are outrageous.

Yet one thing I learned about 2020, is that, by hook or by crook, one needs to survive it. Like everyone else, my money is stuck at the bank (unlike everyone else, I believe long term thinking will solve it). Like everyone else COVID-19 has changed my daily routine (unlike everyone else, due to diabetes and common sense, am taking it very seriously. Or as I mentioned earlier, it was not the original hysteria which broke out that got me worried, but rather what would happen later.) Like everyone else I was about to die (twice) on the day of the Beirut explosion (unlike many, I escaped unharmed). Like everyone, I have made it to October pseudo intact (unlike everyone else, I know how taxing this is on mental health, admit to it, and have tried to to amend to it as much as humanly possible).

Well, so what is my magic trick to survive 2020? From the get go, I stopped comparing it to previous years. Everything: The Dollar exchange rate, the bank withdrawals or lack of it, the new normal (or rather abnormal), the price of things, etc... I keep reading all these people ranting on Instagram - two specific people come to mind - who have zero economic vision, no financial knowledge, and yet who act as moral arbitrators and assign the blame on anyone who is anyone, not understanding their ranting - though popular on Instagram - is actually hollow.

But once you stop comparing, once you go on living as you used to (within one's means), once you do not see today's pricing in the view of last year's economy, once you accept that this is a tricky phase where one must "make do and mend" (literally, I found, not one, but two great tailors in a city nearby), once you understand that subsidizing the fuel must end because it is eating away what is left if the central bank's Dollars... Only then will 2020 make sense to you.

But again, once you stop comparing. Once you readjust your expectations to reality, you will end up surviving 2020. With three months to go, that is no mean feat.