Heretical Sentiments & Long Overdue Confessions!

Under the existing regime, the basic developmental challenges of the country will never be met. The educational system will never be substantively reformed. Health care will never be universal. Enough jobs can never be created. Corruption cannot be effectively checked. Respect for basic rights will forever remain a pipedream. If one step in the right direction is ever taken a giant leap backwards soon follows. And if the world is indeed so full of conspiracies against this poor country, this regime is capable only of playing right into the eager hands of the dastardly conspirators.

This is why I became a believer in regime change. It happened long before Hariri’s assassination.

So, does this mean that my analysis of the current predicament is somehow tainted by own unflattering views of the Syria regime? Of course, they are. Does that mean that I am wrong? Well, I am not sure whether being subjective is necessarily synonymous to being wrong. Otherwise, there can be no right in this world.

Still, and what matters to me at this stage, and seeing that I continue to stumble into things against my better judgment (but not necessarily my inner pre-disposition), things like giving a damn, like becoming an activist, then an oppositionist, and before that a husband and a father, is to see myself being able to live without fear in the very country that I am supposed to call home, and to live free and under no one’s patronage.

I obviously cannot do that with this regime on board. Hell, I may not be able to do with this regime gone even, but that’s a different story, a story of continued cultural alienation and rejection, one that is too chronic to be cured. But with this regime gone, I’ll have a choice, I guess, no matter how theoretical. Or at the very least some visitation rights.

Still, my friends from the good old days of Bohemian quietism and frenetic almost obsessive intellectual and cultural pursuits must be angry with me now. Indeed, I have long been cast out from their heaven, it seems. Somehow, intellectual and cultural pursuits when taken place in a political and social vacuum prove not to be as fulfilling, as they ought to have been, I guess, for someone like me. So much so that someone like me simply grows out of being someone like me, as he slowly drifts away and becomes “other.”

Observing events from the cold margins of things proved no less of a heartache than actual dabbling, and the observer was no less filled with guilt and tumult that those clumsy dabblers out there trying to remake the world in their disfigured and wanting image. The serenity of observation was a mere chimera, an illusion, a self-told lie. Serenity has no real place in this world. This world is forever mad. This is its ultimate nature.

But in Khawla’s arms and the children’s eyes, I do have an occasional respite and shelter, not matter how momentary. Perhaps that should suffice. Indeed, it often does. But being the pathetic fool and greedy bastard that I am I cannot help but yearn for an even greater sense of fulfillment. Yet such fulfillment might just be synonymous with death. Well, I guess I am bound to find out, eventually, just as we all are.