An article series for Al-Modon newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon. Read the columns in Arabic here.
The true audience for this trial is not the 100 Senators confined to their chamber, but rather, the nation as a whole—we, the people—who are collectively consuming news in an old-fashioned, long-form, no-spin format without commercial interruption.
Although Bashar Al-Assad can no longer call the shots in Lebanon, developments and dynamics taking place on the scorched landscape of the fragmented Syrian state, particularly Turkish, Russian, and Iranian interventions, will impact the outcome of Lebanon’s revolution. Much depends on how Hezbollah decides to play its cards in this tense setting.
Watching the joyful demonstrations on the streets of Beirut, my first thought was “What took them so long?”, but my second thought was “When are we going to take to the streets here in the United States to protest metastasizing corruption and greed?”
“Free markets” are not really free, and despite the uncritical assumption that global market capitalism would automatically foster democratic freedoms, today it has become a destructive force, laying waste to communities, public health, networks of solidarity, and even the planet’s rainforests.
While mass shootings are now as American as predatory capitalism and homelessness, these two deadly events, coming in rapid succession, focused public debate not only on guns, but also on the growing overlap between disaffected young white men, Trump’s racist discourse, and far-right movements, many based online, whose adherents are eager to take up arms to attain their twisted goals.
Many of my friends, relatives, and colleagues complain of feeling exhausted, powerless, and depressed as a result of the daily outrages of life under Trump. Americans used to talk about “compassion fatigue,” but now we speak of “outrage fatigue.”
