What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

It’s become a familiar routine, and one that you’d only understand if you were the son of immigrants whose home country is in the news almost exclusively for violence. You wake up, check your phone, and see the news alerts that “something” happened. Some alerts include the names of someone prominent among the dead, and some mention a death toll. You rub your eyes and start to wake up for real.

Now it hits that you’ve seen this scene before, the last time something like this happened, and you’re 2,000 miles and 7 hours behind the news. It all went down while you were asleep. All you can do now is try to react or make sense of it.

A bomb blast exploded in downtown Beirut today. A senior politician in the Western-backed coalition, a close ally and friend of the Hariri family, Mohammed Chatah, was among those dead, along with at least five other people unlucky enough to be going about their day in the same area.

This same story has played out too many other times in Lebanon. As the fires in Syria continue to burn, Lebanon will be prone to flare-ups. Most politicians there find it difficult to remain neutral in a conflict so intertwined with Lebanon’s future, and so affected by larger regional powers, and so they are involved, one way or another.

And the aftermath is always the same. The party targeted will make an accusation. The accused will deny it. The dead will be buried, and life will go in Lebanon.

It’s not that the people have given up hope. It’s not that they are indifferent towards the violence. It’s the feeling of inevitability, of familiarity with what’s about to happen next. And the shrug that says “This has happened before in my lifetime, it’s happening again, and it will happen tomorrow. It’s out of my control.”
Because it sometimes does feel like it’s out of our control. Lebanon’s location, population, and the land it occupies have been both a blessing and a curse. My favorite way to describe Lebanon to friends who haven’t seen it is that you can have a beer on the beach, get in your car, and in an hour you’ll be on top of a mountain. The land is beautiful, and its location is desirable and advantageous. Lebanon is bordered on two sides by Syria, one by the sea, and one by Israel. There are at least six distinct religious groups in the country that constitute sizable minorities, at least 5% of the population each. Two of the largest power players in the region, Iran and Saudi Arabia, hold important influence over large parts of the government and country.

Although the country is known for its lengthy civil war, Lebanon hasn’t fought its own battles. It’s been fighting the battles of the region, of other countries, of powers much larger than its own. The push and pull of the regional cold war, fomented by the interference and king-making of the US government, has frequently played out in Lebanon. The only thing the people of Lebanon have control over is what they choose to do next.