Let Us Hope Posterity Will Endure

Lebanon is a nation where chaos suits it to a tee.

Against all the odds and despite the vulnerability of the entire region, the country and its resilient inhabitants carry on with their usual mode of life as if unconcerned by the threatening dark clouds that hover in their immediate vicinity.

It is almost miraculous that amid all the turbulence that has for so long divided the nation and at times has had a crippling effect on its raison d’être as a democratic entity, Lebanon remains a country unlike its neighbours, where the individual and the various political factions have to some workable extent mastered an art of compromise that gives to the outsider the notion that survival is inherent in their genes.

Their history has taught them the uncanny strategy of profiting from dire circumstances through improvisation of a kind possibly inherited from the enterprising Phoenicians that once lived along their shores.

The Lebanese have travelled to the remotest parts of the globe and to the most inhospitable regions, seeking their fortune, and have notably excelled in the various undertakings they have vigorously followed.

They have scaled the heights of numerous professions in their remarkable quest to show the world that a small nation can spread its knowledge and influence worldwide and be recognised for its endeavours in many of the competitive fields where their contributions have been phenomenal.

With war raging along its borders and the strain of having to cope with thousands of refugees, Lebanon needs all the support it can get from the West.

The Arab world would be bereft without a free and strong Lebanon, with its shining light that dispels the perilous gloom that might eclipse the region for many years to come.

I fear that the world is now on the brink of a catastrophic breakdown of a civilised order, likely to inflict on itself a devastating blow from which recovery is hard to contemplate.

I pray that this period of sheer madness is only a nightmare, which at the break of dawn will dissipate and clearer horizons will ensue.