Here’s a round-up of your current “it” Lebanese news.

• Patriarch Raï is visiting occupied Palestine/Israel/Whatever on May 25th.
• Some Lebanese are not happy about his upcoming visit.
• Those Lebanese are beginning to hint at possible noxious ramifications of the patriarch’s visit to Israel.
• Those Lebanese have begun to group Lebanese Christians in the cliche and stereotypical war-time view of them being constantly in bed with Israel.
• Despite the uproar, Raï is adamant on visiting Jerusalem and receiving Pope Francis as the head of the Maronite congregation there.
• Raï called upon those who are pissed to get over themselves.

I wondered a while back how is it that the Maronite Patriarch cannot visit his Maronite congregation in what is now Israeli territories. Which precedes which, the fact that the patriarch is always Lebanese due to most Maronites being Lebanese or the fact that the patriarch is a man of religion, regardless of what one has to think about his or any other religion?

Today, it seems that the latter is taking precedence. The Maronite Church is keeping the details of the visit as secret as possible. We know that the Patriarch will not be using his Lebanese passport, obviously. We know he will be using a special Vatican-issued permit. We know he will be going to Jerusalem from Cyprus. We know him going there is to receive Pope Francis in the Maronite archdioceses of which he is responsible.

What we know as well is that it is the obligation of the Maronite Patriarch to visit the many archdiocese over which he precedes at least once every five years. The Maronite people who happen to reside in Israel/Occupied Palestine have never had an official visit from the head of the Church they believe in. Such a visit is long-overdue.

To the rest of Lebanese, fear not. None of us can visit Israel that openly and get away with it. The status quo will stay as such until judgement day I would assume but what Raï’s upcoming visit is doing is basically galvanizing the talk about the extent of our animosity towards Israel and where this animosity becomes detrimental to us as Lebanese in the 21st century.

Bashing the patriarch left and right, calling him an undercover Israeli agent, hinting at Lebanese Christians being Israel-fans just because the patriarch is visiting Israel, hinting at possible civil strife in case he goes to Israel and turning a religious trip into a matter of national crisis is the type of fearful, stone-aged Israel-centric mode of thought that in 2014 is no longer acceptable.

It’s become way too easy to call someone a traitor, an agent, call for his execution and whatnot whenever Israel gets mentioned in a sentence. It’s become a knee-jerk reaction to some. This ideological terrorism is not acceptable anymore, but at least Raï can take it and still come out unscathed. What good will it do if the patriarch stays in Bkerke while the Pontiff visits Jerusalem? What good of a message does that send? Isn’t it high time we have a discussion about do’s and don’t’s without someone getting a death threat in return?

Patriarch Raï’s visit to Israel is not suicidal as some people have called it. It will not lead him to normalize with the state of Israel. It won’t indicate a new aged shift towards forgetting the Palestinian cause, forgetting what Israel has done to this country and what being enemy states entails.

Odds are Raï will not applaud the name of Israeli politicians if they’re announced somewhere during his visit, the way he did when he visited Syria last year. He won’t acknowledge Israel’s politicians or its policies. And still his visit is made into the next coming of the apocalypse among some parts of the Lebanese populace.

Not minding Raï going to Israel does not mean unequivocal support to the state of Israel and what it represents. It does not mean we want peace talks to commence right now. If anything, you can look at Raï’s visit to Jerusalem as him saying that it’s not Israeli land. You can look at his visit as a pioneering movement in the act of resistance against Israel: doing so right from within at such a high profile level. Or you can just call him a traitor and be done with it while you listen to Fairuz’s “Al Quds.” It’s your choice.

Pity the nation, I presume, that gets more hormonal over Raï visiting Israel under his religious title, not citizenship, than over an the Iranian ambassador who considered our country part of his extended nation. It sort of puts the whole hypocritical approach to our sovereignty and national pride in context. But has Lebanon ever been anything but hypocritical? It’s hypocritical when it comes to the way we practice religions or lack thereof. It’s hypocritical to the way we practice politics or lack thereof and it’s hypocritical when it comes to which countries we consider as enemies.

Get off Raï’s back. His visit to Jerusalem will probably do more to the Palestinian cause than months of Starbucks boycotts, calling on Lara Fabian concerts to be canceled and threatening Lebanese who dare to use the I-word in a sentence with high treason. What a country.

I was sitting with my grandma a couple of days ago in her warm kitchen while she cooked me lunch. As the tawouk simmered, she started asking me about my days. It’s not the typical chit-chat to let awkward time pass by. She was genuinely concerned.

A few minutes later, my grandma started going on and on about how she wished God would give me nothing but success wherever I went and whatever I did, how I deserved nothing but the best, etc.

What she said might be a bunch of cliches to you, but it got me thinking. There will come a time, and that time is coming up really soon, where I will probably say goodbye to my grandmother at an airport gate, like many of my friends, and never see her again.

The idea made me terribly sad. I started wondering if I really should go through that. Why is it that we all need to face such a moment in our lives of farewells that don’t have a meeting on another side?

I sat down and tried to come up with a list. I like lists. My obsessive tendencies find solace in such forms of organization that put things clearly in front of you.

Pros of staying in Lebanon: family, hummus.

Cons of staying in Lebanon: subpar future medical training, subpar future salaries, subpar future life, subpar security, subpar facilities, subpar infrastructures, subpar everything else?

The shock of my life came to a visit to Istanbul recently. I was going there in the mindset that the city would definitely be subpar, that there would be very few things to see and do, despite what everyone else was telling me. It was, after all, a city in Turkey, a third world country like mine. How good could it be?

I was faced with one of the more impressive European cities I’ve actually been to. It had an extremely well-functioning public transportation system. It felt safe. The sites were all extremely preserved and a delight to see. The queues were enormous. Everywhere was very crowded. The shops stayed open till midnight. The streets kept bustling till 5AM. The internet was very fast. The streets were very clean and had all forms of landscape design about them. The greenery was abundant. The city had an undeniable charm to it with its rustic buildings and preserved style. I was in love.

I was also saddened by how things could be for the cities I call home. I was walking through Istiklal street late one night when it was drizzling and the crowds were dense enough to be charming and the street acts were singing and it felt so alive in that moment that I thought about Beirut and Tripoli and what they could have been, Istanbuls in a third world country, and it made me sad because back home, people were still arguing over March 14th and March 8th, digging up 1975 civil war ideas and hurling it at each other to give credibility to their claims in 2014. Back home, people were calling for war in times of peace, unaware of their actions and unaware that there was anything wrong in what they were doing.

In Lebanon, the best analogy that can be given to us is that many of us are Beirut and Tripolis that are waiting to be turned into an Istanbul: people who have the potential to be something but are held back just by being here. The truth is that we will always be held back as long as we stay here, because this isn’t a place that wants to harness our potential and become a better place for us to grow and make it grow. This is a place that is content with what it has and what good that has to offer and doesn’t seek to improve upon it. Will it ever change?

My friend Ismail is my first friend to leave today. Hala, Stephanie, Elia, Mira and many more are leaving soon. Some of their older siblings have already left. Their younger ones are already preparing to leave. I’m leaving too because my future here is anything but guaranteed the way that I want my future to be.

My generation isn’t the only one to leave as well. My grandma has gone through such goodbyes way too many times. She did them with her daughter whom she shipped off to Australia about 30 years ago. She did it with her three sons who left her to go to the United States a couple of decades ago. She probably told her sons and daughter the same thing she told me. I’m also certain she had hoped they’d come back to her one day when, as she definitely told them, things got better here.

I’m sure we all have tales of our grandmothers and mothers doing the same over and over again to no avail.

My mother told me that same thing that day. Why don’t you finish your speciality in the United States and then come back work here? She was sure things would be better in 10 years. But are they? My mother was anything but realistic, I guess. Both of my parents acknowledge, however, that they know I must leave and recommend me doing so.

Pity the nation whose parents know their children must leave them indefinitely to have a better life for themselves?

My country has never ever seen me as a priority. Today, my country is preoccupied with trying to elect a president who will do nothing. It’s also preoccupied with a growing debate about legalizing hashish because that’s definitely a priority. In a few months, it will become preoccupied with the 2013 debate of an electoral law again and I’ll still be forgotten. By next year, some other political mess would take center stage and we’ll all be relinquished to the sidelines as we observe, take sides and forget. The cycle will then proceed to repeat all over again.

But don’t you worry, people, because Beirut was on some fancy list a while back, nightlife is abundant, summer festivals are up in full swing and the tourists might come back this year!

It’s perhaps detrimental to our mental state to think that our perpetual stagnation will last another decade or more, but it would be erroneous to assume otherwise given how we’ve been living. Many of the current generation has only been governed by one speaker of parliament in its lifetime. The people we grew up around have been discussing the same politics today of when we were children. “Enta Aoune aw Ouwatje, enta Roum aw Mwarne” was what we got asked as kids. The same questions still get asked today.

A few years from now, my mother will become a grandmother. And she will be cooking lunch to one of her grandsons. And she will tell him how she wants nothing but the best for him in life and I’m sure he’ll wonder if he’ll ever see her again when the time comes for him to leave. Family and hummus or everything else? That hummus must be exquisite.

I don’t care about who ends up president.

I don’t care about the presidency to begin with, but I do understand that the seat becoming vacant, which it probably will for the second time in a row, will indicate how utterly fucked up our political system is. It’s okay though, no one expects otherwise.

But after the first round of presidential elections, the only question I want to ask is: why the hell are we not voting for the president? Why are some of those parliament “members” voting for who will pretend to lead the country for the next 6 years?

There was a moment there, just before they starting counting the ballots, that I realized how underwhelming our elections actually are. Many didn’t even know our parliament was voting today. Many others didn’t care, and quite honestly why would anyone want to bother when we all know exactly how silly of a charade we were going to have to watch?

Yes, our elections are massively underwhelming because we – as people – are massively irrelevant as we await the main heads directing our parliamentary blocks to get their OK president from their country of political origin.

I expected the presidential vote to be predictable, indicative of how big of a joke our self-anointed parliament actually is. What I did not expect however is for our parliament to reveal itself as the combo of civil war-hung up people whose maturity range is that of a fourteen year old who has yet to hit puberty and whose IQ is that of a whale, with all respect to whales in all their forms.

I don’t mind blank papers. I couldn’t care less about Samir Geagea’s name being cast 48 times. Good for him. It’s not like he will ever win. What I do mind, however, is for some parliament members to be so spiteful, degrading, loathing and so utterly immature and irresponsible that they’d cast votes for civil war victims who have been allegedly killed by Samir Geagea back in the day, as if anyone knows who killed whom in our civil war, but everyone gets to be the expert, of course, in typical Lebanese fashion.

As I heard the names of Jihane Frangieh, Rachid Karami and whatnot being read out loud, I felt sad because there’s someone in parliament who is legislating on my behalf (or not) who actually thought it was a good idea to cast such a ballot. I felt sad because what is supposed to be a round of a presidential vote ended up becoming a gathering of kindergarten children in playtime.

Of course, such an opinion of Geagea exists in the Lebanese populace. But this is not the Lebanese populace. This is a parliament that should hold the minimum levels of professionalism when faced with a task of choosing who the country’s president will be. Parliament is not a place for such votes, no matter how poetic some people want to spin it.

Why are those people voting for my president again? What kind of system is this that gives people like them the right to have that choice?

How can we hope to have a strong enough president when the only way for someone to become as such is for him to be liked by the 128MPs making parliament?

Sure, on a bigger Lebanese scale people like them exist profusely. I only had to check Facebook and a Twitter for a wide cross section of people whose version of the civil war is basically the Lebanese Forces starting it, killing everyone and then losing. But on a bigger scale, I’d like to think people who are that spiteful get diluted among those who can actually see beyond the Lebanese civil war in casting a vote for a president.

This is not a country that has moved on. This is not a country that will ever move on if whenever – as they say – “bi de’ l kouz bl jarra” we end up digging up every single thing that happened in the not so long past, just because we can, in the most hypocritical of ways.

How many parliament members of the likes of those that were so gallant to cast ballots of civil war victims would cast a vote for current murderers participating in neighboring wars and holding the country hostage? No one.

I was told that having almost 50 parliament members vote for Geagea means we don’t deserve this country. After what I’ve seen today, I want to say this country doesn’t deserve us. It’s 2014 and we’re still pretending the civil war was yesterday, have member in parliaments voting for the civil war and have politicians who were all active way back then.

I want to vote for the president, not clowns in parliament who think it’s recess time.