You’re eating dinner at a restaurant over looking the beach…. You notice people go up to the T.V. Your friends look at you and ask what’s going on? You say “probably another bomb”. Five minutes later everyone is back to their seats. You over hear people saying something about a bombing at Zouk Mousbah’s industrial region, and then a quick check…. “Nope, don’t know anyone there”… And within 10 minutes everything is back to normal, people eating, drinking, laughing, and puffing on their water pipes. A strange calmness like nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Only a few phones ring.
I remember when the bombings first started a couple of years ago… As soon as a bomb went off… My phone would start ringing off the hook. My parents would call from Saudi, my cousins from UAE, my friends from all over Lebanon. We would cancel our plans and stay home. A month of that and then we figured out that never do two bombs go off in the same night and so for a while we would wait till we heard a bomb went off and then we would make plans to go out…. SICK, I know… The bombs stopped after a while and political assassinations started to become more popular. And well as long as you weren’t a politician or an out spoken journalist, you were fine and so life as usual.
The bombs started again on May 21st, the day after the army raided Fatah Al Islam safe house. I was sleeping and I woke up to the phone ringing. It was midnight, a minute after my brother walks into my room… “They started bombing again”… And so since then every few days a bomb would go off somewhere. At the beginning, you call your friends, people call you and you are glued to the T.V. following the live coverage. Shops closed early, People didn’t go out past 9. People organized neighborhood watch.
Eventually you become desensitized. Shop owners start fixing their damaged storefronts with in hours of a bombing. You go back and shop at those areas that were bombed cause you think to yourself “the probability of them bombing the same place twice is not likely”. You reduce your bombing call list to those that live in the area of the bombing. And the only time you panic is when you are on the road between 9 p.m. and midnight fearing that they might bomb an area as you pass by it…. But once you reach your destination your mind goes numb and you go on enjoying the rest of your night. It’s strange…. But I remember reading an article once about the mind of those who lived in Lebanon during the civil war and how they effectively went on with their daily lives and only when the war was over did they finally break down.
