When one encounters a feeling of being stuck, it takes often a while to ask oneself: “What can I do?” Even more time to ask together, as one nation: ‘What can WE do?’
But once one and many acknowledge the magnitude of stuckness and start asking questions, when one and many allow grief to do its overwhelming justice without committing intellectual/spiritual/psychological suicide, then things are already put in the motion of change.
The Greeks called this way of nature Enantiodromia: enantios = opposite, dromos = running course. When something is fully admitted and recognized, it begins to turn into its opposite.
In the Lebanese case and most South Western Asian countries caught in the fires of war, once violence in all its forms, from domestic violence to A la Da3ech violence, is recognized by the local populations – recognition means here that the so-called invincible aura surrounding violence is no more -, then peace can be.
Auras disappear, or at least, could become dim lightbulbs.
I admit that a cursory look at contemporary Lebanese and South Western Asian history might seem to confirm that war is part of many individuals’ genetic code and-or part of their culture. Murderers, humans living in this region may sometimes be, but they are not all the died-in-the-wool warriors of anthropological legends and geopolitical gurus/experts.
Peace is also a past and present local reality/experience/praxis. It is part of the local DNA. It is not exceptional, nor impossible. It is, as described in many of the spiritual traditions, including the monotheistic religions that emerged from the South Western Asian mindset, the realization of humanity’s nature.
Peace is, simply put, an ordinary possibility…