The lettuce theory

The news are (and I'm not sure if they're correct or not) that a fellow Lebanese blogger was asked by the Lebanese authorities to change a post by which he criticized president Sleiman, well that's new! And that's totally inacceptable. Although I actually disagree with the blogger, this way of dealing with him or any other blogger is totally refused and totally useless, and to whoever decided to investigate with the blogger about what he mentioned I would like to say come on grow up, he's just a guy writing on his blog why are you making a fuss out of it? Lots of people agree with him and lots of others disagree that's the reality of Lebanon and you can't change that by making him change his tone.

And whoever was annoyed by the article can simply reply in a brief and logical manner to prove the blogger wrong.
However, I disagree with most of the bloggers who spoke in reaction to what happened about what they named "the Lebanese system". This is not the case in Lebanon, simply due to the extremely different geopolitical structure in Lebanon compared to other countries where the name "system" might apply. So adopting worn out ideologies and coming to fight the wind mills "a la Don Quichote" is useless too, I hate it how people are so enthusiastic to fight for their freedom of speech (which is something nice) but they don't care about the freedom of their minds and they leave their brains preys and prisoners of predefined, constrained and limited ideologies. There's no single good recipe to things in this world, everything is relative; that's how nature and the nature of things are and each and every problem requires a tailored solution that replies to its nature. There's no single ideology that "passe partout" and the quest for solutions is an open one that might or might not end in time, that quest is where progress comes from not from worn out ideologies.

Anyway, there's a Lebanese saying: "ma khasso bel deneh, 3ayesh bel khasseh" I like it a lot because ironically it's very Lebanese; since in a simple way that's the problem of Lebanon. For the majority of us, each one of us 3ayesh bi khasseh of his own and this lettuce is unique and differs slightly or largely from one Lebanese to the other, because its leafs consist of the common stuff like, among others, sectarian fanaticism inside a certain community and they consist too of unique leafs that are related to, I don't know, some random stochastic processes in the Lebanese person's brains that are intrinsically unrelated to logical thinking, noise in the neurons. Well I have nothing against noise in the neurons everyone has the right to speak out and should speak out but at the end noise is noise.

I know the situation in Lebanon is annoying and it pisses off each and every one of us, but to a very wide extent and instead of looking to see the problem and try to deal/cope with it, people deal and cope with their anger and dissatisfaction not with the problem itself; and how do they do that? By harshly criticizing someone they don't like and by blaming them for the bad situation, yeah and it's not new the Lebanese invented something called "el 7a2 3al telian" right?

So everyone seeks to blame unlawfully the side to which he/she is the least attached emotionally. Unlawfully because he/she is blaming that side for what it should be blamed and for what the other side should be blamed and the other side remains in its angelic status, that's the typical mentality and we're stuck; who's right? And who's wrong? These questions in the way they are treated are like: who invented the hot water?

Furthermore, for those who were criticizing the Fouad chehab era and “el maktab el teneh" I would like to tell them ya reit byerja3 el maktab el teneh. The chehab era was the brightest in the Lebanese modern history and the freedom levels weren't so bad, they were pretty high. For sure, I'm not asking for things same as what happened with our fellow blogger, it's totally ridiculous to limit the freedom of speech for bloggers or the traditional media, but it's so important to fight corruption in tandem with the judiciary system, and to create a national security. And again this wouldn't mean to fabricate files against whoever is disliked; it is routine, pure and simple police work to fight with a good judiciary system all sorts of crime and all sorts of corruption. Each country requires such a device and it's there even in the most democratic countries. It's just something to maintain order according to the constitution and the civil laws otherwise there's no way, for example, of putting an end to corruption in Lebanon.
Yes we do have a freedom of speech and we want it to stay as it is regardless of any type of considerations, but I've been following the Lebanese blogosphere for almost 5 years now and except for the beautiful publications on it of literary, social or artistic nature what is published is just an insult for the freedom of speech concept, because all what the political bloggers did was to b**ch out on each other. Freedom of speech is essential and important but it has no value if it's not used to say something that has a meaning and a value.

Thanks for reading my useless "fazlakeh", that's just my simple opinion and I guess that this post was worse than the previous; I know I promised the opposite so I apologize for that.