Inured to Violence

Here's a phenomenal essay entitled "Living with the Violence of Beirut" on how the citizens of Beirut coped with the effects of war in the early 80's, in the midst of constant fighting and arbitrary death. This was written by Thomas L Friedman and published in 1983, long before he became famous as the author of "The World is Flat."  The entire article is worth checking out. I can't think of many people who've endured what the Lebanese have over the last few decades...

"...Since the 1975 Lebanese civil war, Beirut has become a synonym for violence. But if Beirut were only violence and ugliness, it would be an easy place to handle and understand. It isn't. As longtime residents know, what makes Beirut a truly wild, occasionally insane and often absurd place to live is not its raw violence. It is the fact that such violence is always framed against some of the most carefree and prosaic activities of daily existence. Life in this city is absurd not because people get killed, but because they get killed playing tennis or lying on the beach or shopping in the market or driving home from work. The city lives in that half light between security and insecurity, war and truce, in which there is usually enough security to go about one's day but never enough to feel confident that it won't be your last.

¶Beirut is the society hostess who turns to you at a dinner party and complains in a stage whisper that she ''almost died'' going to her bridge game. Beirut is the slick advertisement in between the hairdresser ads and the social notes of a popular English-language weekly offering shatter-resistant window coating ''to protect yourself and the people around you from the danger of flying glass.'' Its main pitch: ''Anytime, anyplace, an explosion can happen.'' Beirut is the unforgettable tableau of a Kaytusha rocket, its engines spewing reddish-yellow flames, arcing over the skyline as the sun in the background slips into the Mediterranean with a brilliant orange glow.

¶The stress of living in such an environment, which has prevailed for the last eight years and continues to the present moment, has transformed traditional patterns of daily life for rich and poor alike. Coping with Beirut, staying sane here, is not simply hiding in a shelter. Rather, it demands a thousand little changes in one's daily habits and a thousand little mental games to avoid being overwhelmed by it all. The cumulative effect of all these changes has been to alter everything from language to work and entertainment to the way buildings are built. It has driven some people mad or into crime, while enabling others to discover positive qualities in themselves that they never knew existed.

¶''What I think we are experiencing in Lebanon is something that is unlike any stress problems psychiatrists or psychologists have had to deal with anywhere in the past,'' said Edwin Terry Prothro, director of the Center for Behavioral Research at the American University of Beirut. ''An earthquake, a Hiroshima, those are one-shot affairs. Even Northern Ireland can't really be compared to Beirut because the central government there and all its services always continued to operate and the level of Belfast's violence was far lower and more transient than here. The resilience of human beings is so great that they can always recover from sporadic violence. But Beirut is different. Beirut is eight straight years. I got some books out the other day on disaster relief, but they had nothing to offer. There are no prescriptions about what to do about a Beirut.''