Fadi is a 23-year-old medical student living in a bubble. He walks around in it, goes out with a girl living in a similar bubble, and socializes with friends from his bubble community. Fadi and other fellow bubblers make up a vast number of the Lebanese people.But if these religious, ethnic or cultural bubbles were ever to pop, would Fadi and his friends be able to breathe the different air? Listen to different voices? Speak a different language? The Lebanese government today officially identifies eighteen different religious sects distributed over an area of 10,452 square kilometers. That makes Lebanon a country with many beliefs, but very little space. Lebanon’s democracy is “governed by a confessional system whereby quotas divide the country’s major political posts among the various sects. For example, Lebanese law dictates that the president should be a Christian Maronite, the Speaker of Parliament a Shia Muslim, and the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim. Furthermore, a recurrent historical observation clearly shows that major sectarian problems arose particularly when political tensions came to a climax, and vice versa. Thus, politics and sectarianism in Lebanon have always been intertwined, with the major political blocks each associated with a certain religious sect. The problem with Lebanese diversity does not merely lie in the fact that it is not being celebrated, but in that it poses a threat. Most, if not every one, of the many sects or political groups feel threatened by others. Therefore, people who are religiously or politically affiliated in Lebanon often find refuge in their own communities, which most of the time provide them with social services, security, job opportunities, and sometimes even schooling for their children. As a result, many people end up spending most of their lives safely hidden in their own bubbles. You can easily find people who have never communicated with people from a different sect or political affiliation, even if they are geographically very close. The bubble problem is most important when it comes to Lebanon’s youth, since they represent a fresh hope to old problems. Most of the time, they fall victim to the existing segregated system and end up joining the same political party, adopting the same ideas, attending the same religious schools and raising the same flags as their parents.In the last six years, as political events climaxed once more following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Lebanon has witnessed a rise in NGO activism. These NGOs are working to bring people together for the overall welfare of the country. Many of these NGOs are calling for anti-sectarianism, secularism, and even the formation of a shadow youth government. Despite the success of some of these projects, in general, they face many problems, especially in their approach and the sustainability of results.We cannot simply settle for the adoption of Western methods and expect them to work perfectly in Lebanese society. A typical example of a Western approach to solve this kind of socio-political problem would be to launch awareness campaigns on the subject and call for short, one-time seminars and conferences that bring young people together. Unlike in the United States where college students are somewhat removed from their parents’ opinions and lifestyles, most Lebanese youth live with their parents during and after college, and so students return to the same home, the same bubble, at the end of their day, mitigating the impact of these short experiences.Young Lebanese need to see, taste, touch, and listen to the things that they have in common, regardless of other general differences. Youth need to leave their day-to-day routines and live with each other, without any intervention from their parents, neighbors, or political affiliates. Sending young people to an interfaith work-study camp, where they would have to work together and leverage everyone’s skills – such as leadership, teamwork and constructive debating – in order to achieve shared goals. In the process, they are exposed to challenges that are representative of problems they might face in the real world. A successful simulation of a bubble-free world would helps demonstrate that a real version of such a world is in fact possible.Today, Lebanon is experiencing the worst political climax in the modern history of the country, where we are left – for the very first time – with no elected president, due to a lack of dialogue at the level of the country’s leaders and so-called diplomats. More urgently than ever, the youth of this country must choose a different future, and begin to see their role as active ingredients change.
Raissa Batakji is in her junior year in communication arts and journalism at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.
