feeding the status quo

I've been writing on this blog for over a year and a half, and sometimes I get terrified by the fact that I have nothing to say anymore. The truth is, when I began, I wanted to find a way to push my writing and get me to write a novel, which is basically my dream.

And I thought, "Beirut Rhapsodies," well that should be fun. I had a bunch of single friends who always had some kind of story about that girl or about that guy, I thought Beirut was this endless source of fun stories that I would always be able to incorporate in my blogs. I was wrong though. After a while, stories run dry.

The problem with this city is that we live in a box. As a person of a certain social class, it is very unlikely that you ever find yourself with people from different social backgrounds. It's not like in other big cities where anyone and everyone find each other uncomfortably close on a subway ride.

In the Beirut I live in, there are clear boundaries and there are walls closing in on us. Everywhere you go, you see the same faces, week after week, month after month, year after year. Someone told me the other day they went to White and "it was the exact same people sitting at the exact same tables" as last year, and that is a scary thought. But it's true. You go to any bar or night-club or rooftop bar --because frankly, there is not much else to do-- and you know exactly who to expect. And then you have the same conversations over and over again. And when you overhear someone else's conversation, you realize that they are talking about the same thing too.

As a writer, you get inspired by other people, by places and encounters. You feed off other people's conversations, you meet someone who will tell you a story, you see something that gives you an idea. Sometimes you just need to take a walk and look at things happening around you to get creative. Other times you just want to sit under a tree in a park and read a book to get your mind flowing. But here we have no parks. And if you take a walk in the street you spend half your time ignoring the idiotic sexual purrs of every other guy passing you by and the other half trying not to get run over. And although some people try, very hard to bring some culture to this country, by opening an art center or by throwing a film festival, it is very unlikely that it will get as much attention as a new fashionista clothing store, another Lebanese designs jewelry shop, or the latest bar in town.

This is what we do here: We take the status quo and we feed it, so that it becomes more snob and more blase, more induced in that heartbreaking comfort zone and more lazy, until we do nothing but try to make enough money to keep a lifestyle we're not sure we enjoy. Our lives revolve around relationships and jobs, and for many girls, about appearance and body image. It is what makes for most of our conversations, except on Sunday when we have a family lunch and someone has the grand idea to talk about politics.

And then we say we have the greatest country in the world. We can infamously "swim and ski" in the same day and the sun is out 9 months a year. But what's the point? We're so beyond closed up there are still people who decide to cross the street when the light turns green. And it's our own fault really. We find excuses for everything: We had 25 years of war goddammit. We need people of action in government in stead of a bunch of grumpy old men who want to settle their own personal scores but we're the ones who can't let go of them and keep them in office. We don't want to learn how to recycle or wear our seat-belts before more important things in the country are taken care of, because what's the point? And it's never, never our own fault.

The bigger problem is, we act the same way with our own lives. We drown in our own comfort zone, we stay safe, we get lazy. We complain but don't do anything about it, hoping someone else will. And secretly also hoping they wont, because change scares us and we're not sure we can handle it.

Why I should write about Kony

This post has absolutely nothing to do with my usual Rhapsodies.

My cousin posted on my FB wall this morning "you should blog about Kony" and I thought "no, I shouldn't, it's not the kind of blog posts I write at all." And then I went on to read my FB Newsfeed to read half a dozen statuses linking to bloggers destroying the Kony campaign and trashing their work, whether they think its because the Invisible Children's shady financials or because they think it's too gullible to actually believe that making the general public aware of who Kony is actually going to change something. Some even think it's a whole conspiracy by the United States Government to gain enough public support to go to Uganda or Congo or Sudan and make them think it was their idea.

I think that, if nothing else, what Invisible Children have done is start a worldwide conversation between millions of people on how to change this terrifying, disgusting world we live in. It was a genius idea, perfectly executed, to get the entire world to think outside their little world where only they and a few others exist, and think about the world as a whole. Here in Lebanon, we've known wars. We've known massacres. We know what human cruelty can be like. Right next door, thousands of innocent men and women and children are being killed and no one in the world wants to get their hands dirty. They're already fighting enough wars, you see, the ones where they could potentially get monetary gain.

Who am I to talk? Well, a part from writing this ingenuous blog giving you my very wise insight about relationships and quarter life crisis, I am also a journalist. And a screenwriter. And the programs manager for a Foundation whose sole purpose is to make children happy now. How do all these things fit? Well, as a journalist and with my experience in the film industry, I know that when you go somewhere to find a story, you're not sure what to expect. When the group of young, fresh out of college filmmakers went to Uganda, I'm sure they didn't know that nine years later they would produce a film watched by 40 million people in three days. They wanted to tell a story. Most journalists, if not all, want to do that. Some of them even die for that. And they want to tell these stories because the only way to make people act or react is to tell them what is going on. Is to find a way to get them out of their own, self-absorbed lives for 30 minutes and concentrate on something else. And if using a cute blond five-year-old helps you catch their attention, so be it.

Everybody is criticizing Invisible Children because they spend so much of the money on salaries and campagning. You know it would be really nice if we could all work in NGOs for free. Most people who give their lives to humanitarian work probably would if they had other means of surviving. because let's face it: any full time job requires a pay. I work for an NGO. I know that donors would prefer if my salary went to programs for children. I would prefer that too. But if I didn't get paid, I would be obliged to get another job, and I wouldn't be able to help any of these children at all. And spending money to reach 40 million people overnight, I believe is money well spent. NGOs around the world spend millions on fundraising campaigns and the reason why they don't get criticized is because not that many people saw their campaigns... It just proves that at least Invisible Children got their money's worth.

And of course they have to simplify their course of action. Of course they realize more than any of us that it's not enough to sign a pledge and stick posters everywhere. But it's a step. It's better than doing nothing and it could lead to a lot.The Foundation I work for has had the same problem for the last year and half: we get criticized that no one understands what we do. That we do "too many programs" and that they are all over the place. It's true, we didn't pick one specific child problem (like Cancer or heart disease) we want to help any children in need, and that means there are going to be a lot of different programs. So what? We know that we're changing the lives of hundreds of children everyday... now we need to work on our communication, because when people don't understand what we do, they are less likely to donate. And then we can't help anybody. And experts tell us that in our communication, we don't have to explain every single thing we do. We should just give out the headlines. Pick out the things that are likely to resonate and stick in people's mind. Which is exactly what Invisible Children did. If you go to their website, you will see the different programs they have in place, for education and protection, the things they do on the ground to protect children. But if their campaign had been "let's educate the child soldiers" it would have never gotten the same response as it got now. Their documentary "Invisible Children" which they did in 2006 was done to show the world what was happening. Did people react? Some. Nothing like 40 million people in 3 days though.

So yeah, I should write about Kony. Everybody should write about Kony. Because it's not about Kony. It's about the idea that we live in a world where frontiers are man-made, and where no one gets to choose where they are born. And we live in an age where people figured out ways to overcome frontiers and distances, and can communicate in real time with the rest of the world. How can we not take advantage of that?