It’s been just over a year since my last post on this website and as you can see, I haven’t really done anything with it. I’ve lost interest in sharing news about Lebanon or my Looks Like Beirut campaign. To be honest, I had very low expectations of the current Salam government and even with that, I was dumbstruck with how major issues were handled (or more precisely, not handled) by this government. How can you expect people who, for the most part, hate each other to meet weekly and agree on things? You already have an incoherent, dysfunctional, corrupt group of individuals and you ask them to form a coherent, functional and effective team to not only run, but develop a country? How can anyone expect anything good out of this?

The straw that broke the camel’s back

Since I started this blog back in 2009, a myriad of incidents and issues took place in Lebanon and yet I still continued with my blog and campaign. Was there anything specific that really made me throw in my keyboard? I would have to say, yes – the garbage crisis – and more specifically these posts I had written pre-2015:

• Garbage-Strewn Scunthorpe Reminds Visitor of Downtown Beirut
• Garages Turned Garbage Dumps in Aylesbury Look Like Beirut

I would have never imagined that  I would be chiding people for comparing garbage-strewed streets to Beirut when a few years later, Beirut would become a dump. The amount of corruption and double-dealing that played out during the crisis was mind-boggling. Don’t get me wrong, I know how corrupt Lebanon’s system of government is but what absolutely shocked and disgusted me was how open the politicians were to it. Honestly, it was like the government was saying that we haven’t yet found a solution to the garbage situation because we couldn’t agree on how to split the earnings and contracts among each other. It was in-your-face corruption and the government officials couldn’t care less.

Where to next?

So what happens next to Lebanon News: Under Rug Swept? I’ve decided that my entire website needs an overhaul and most definitely a renaming. I am going to restart blogging though the topics will be more current and general; although it may include Lebanon-related news, it will be very much wide-ranging on topics that keep me thinking. The posts I currently have will be maintained in an archive so that they are still accessible but will no longer be the focus of my website.

So this is the end of the line for now. See you all on the other side:

The railway at Saïda in 2007 By Philippe Berthelot (Own work (Photo personnelle)) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons