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Vote for Lira

Photo by Jack Keene

It's not often that someone my age has a profound change of heart. Morals are something you develop (or ought to) through careful examination and years of mistakes; this is why you cherish them, and fight to protect them. The fact is the older you get the more stubborn you become, the more unwilling you are to bend to anyone else's suggestions. Take politics, for instance:  horse-trading, back-biting, double-dealing; I thought myself immune from the whole dirty business. Apparently, I'm not. Effectively I've sold my vote in the June election. And so have you, most likely.

OK, so maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. Balaclavaed men didn't turn up on my doorstep with a bag of hundred dollar bills to secure my vote. I won't go into the grisly details but it's a story we are all intimately aware of: boy has vote, a vaguely familiar man inquires politely, the next day your mother's car has been fixed, or your father's loan extended.

We all know what the right answer is in a democratic state. Votes should not be purchased. If voting is meant to be a cornerstone of freedom then votes cannot carry a price tag, because freedom would itself then have a price. It would no longer be free to be free – see what I did there? Yet human nature in every democratic nation has bastardized the concept to some degree. Given the opportunity to vote freely, a man should default to his best long-term interest; but if a president is likely to raise taxes in the best long-term interest, and another has promised to buy flowers, we'd have a dozen red roses all around. In Lebanon though, we've bastardized it, slapped it around, buried it, dug it up and buried it somewhere else.

The problem here is that people don't care about the bigger picture, the greater good (even their own) or anything beyond their very immediate interests. I guess decades of war have lodged it in our psyche; if you spent your entire adult life in a shelter then you've necessarily learned to live minute by minute, and have grown incapable of living for tomorrow. I've made a thousand mistakes in my teens, and I'll make a thousand more before I'm done here, but I've hardly ever felt remorse. It wasn't that I lacked a conscience, but remorse needs a tomorrow. And what if you thought there was to be no tomorrow, tomorrow?