As I touch my pocket computer to send to my television by invisible waves a baseball game happening in a ballpark 509 miles from where I sit (I know exactly, because I looked it up on the GPS that comes from a satellite in SPACE,) I am thinking about the phone call I had today with my friend in Lebanon, a country that is 5,826 miles across an ocean, one that I have traversed countless times in a big metal room we call "airplane," a vehicle that has brought me to five continents and countless countries where I have met many people who would become my friends.
He owns a tiny pub in a university district in Beirut. It is the very definition of a dive bar, with little lighting, no refrigerator (he has a giant cooler for beer), and the occassional cockroach that you learn to ignore. I spent countless hours there drinking Almaza beer, learning about life in Lebanon, meeting new people, and playing darts. He and a handful of others were the first to open bars in the neighborhood after the 15 year "civil war" in Lebanon, which was really just World War III fought on a tiny, beautiful piece of land next to the blue honey of the Mediterranean. It was a war between Lebanese, but also a war between Lebanese and Palestians, Lebanese and Israelis, Israelis and Palestians, Israelis and Syrians, Syrians and Lebanese, Americans and Soviets, Americans and Iranians, Iranians and Israelis...you get the point.
He has three rules in his bar: no politics, no religion, and no kissing. (LOL on that last one - he has a lot of college kids coming in.) Very rarely did I ever see the rules broken, because young Lebanese are fed up with sectarianism and just want to live their lives in peace.
Now he has no business at all thanks to the atrocities happening to the south of Lebanon in the so-called Holy Land, because most of the foreign customers have left the country (Beirut is full of NGO workers, foreign correspondents, and businesspeople from Western and the Gulf states,) as well as many Lebanese nationals, who have a large diaspora spread across the globe because assholes won't stop fighting in their part of the world. The Lebanese economy had already basically collapsed before the genocide in Gaza; now it is...I don't even know how to describe it. Lebanese have been literally robbing banks to get their own money out for a couple of years. Now there isn't even money to rob. My friend is broke. I don't know how he is going to keep his bar open.
We live in this amazing world where we can watch a baseball game from a machine we carry in our pockets, talk to anyone on the planet at any time, and book flights so we can visit them anywhere and meet new people from different countries and different backgrounds, but instead of marveling at the world around us, people choose to divide themselves by "beliefs" and kill each other over what amounts to ancient fairytales that have been manipulated by politicians over millennia to control the masses.
That my own country and so many people in it support a genocide is shameful. That college students are getting beaten by cops and faculty are facing termination for opposing genocide is fascism. Shame on those cheerleading mass murder, especially the so-called Christians, who are really rooting for the aggressors because their lives are so miserable they want an Apocalypse to end them, and they think forcing the fullfillment of a warped interpretation of an ancient prophecy will bring it.
Despite rightwing politicians trying to impose their Christian sharia laws they think their religion supports, in the Bible, Jesus only had a few rules, all of which are not difficult to follow but which are broken by American politico-Christians every day. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless. Treat foreigners as one of you. Turn the other cheek. And do unto others as you would have done unto you.
A hell of a lot of people want to be abused and murdered, apparently.
