Politics is everything around this place. Politicians, for us, are a love-hate relationship. Many of us say we don’t support one over the other but deep down, we always do. Most of us want to believe those politicians are where they are because we give them power but we also know, deep down, that this isn’t true.

If you happen to be against someone politically, you begin to hate everything that person does: the way they walk, talk, behave, gesticulate. You begin to see the flaws in everything they do. Their struggles make you happy. Their personal failures become your personal triumphs.

And the only thing you know of them is what you have been primed for years to believe, thinking it was all your personal decision, totally separate from your parents and your environment growing up. That politician you openly “criticize” but secretly adore is put on a pedestal. You create arguments to justify everything he does and despite it not making sense, you still force some sense on it. And you believe it’s all normal.

The lives of our politicians then become a matter of public property. Hate them or love them, whatever they do is yours for the taking, the discussion, the gossiping.

The latest news, published by Lebanese tabloid newspaper Al Akhbar is of a separation between LF leader Samir Geagea and his wife Sethrida. The couple has been married since 1991. The article is nauseating. I am not a journalist but in what world is it news reporting when an article holds more of a journalist’s obviously biased opinion than the supposed facts from which his article is starting from?

Of course, I read such news with an air of skepticism. This is Al Akhbar after all, a newspaper that turned Turkish soldiers leaving the UNIFIL into Lebanon triumphing over the Ottoman empire. I also read these divorce rumors while feeling sorry for Geagea’s family troubles. Like him or hate him, I cannot shamelessly parade my absolute happiness with him having troubles with his wife.

That, however, is apparently something we do.

Why are some people happy with Samir Geagea’s divorce? Because they are so blinded by hate that they cannot, for even a fraction of a second, see that these politicians are also people who go through trouble as well and who don’t need their laundry paraded in front of everyone just because they deal with public matters. Because some people cannot look into a mirror and extrapolate such situations on them personally to see how they’d feel being turned into a joke.

I guess not much can be expected from people who think May Chidiac hasn’t died because “Allah ma biti2a.”