Day one post two blasts that killed 45 of its sons and daughters, this is Tripoli.
This morning, these young men and women are not pointing fingers and expressing blame. They are not sinking to the sectarian rhetoric that many people believe will change how this country is going. They are mourning their city in the way they know best: by cleaning up the rubble and the destruction so they can at least have part of the place they call home back.
For many Lebanese, Tripoli is a city that exists way up there, beyond that army checkpoint, that we don’t need to visit. For many Lebanese, Tripoli exists only as a city that is ravaged by Islamists and militants and violence and destruction. But this city, which currently sits in a near-comatose situation, is – thanks to the efforts of those young men and women – trying to get its spirit back, fully knowing that it may not be for long in a country that has become nothing more than the playground of the struggles of others.
Today, I will not bore you with political extrapolations about what might have been and what could be. I won’t state of the obvious and remind everyone how bad the situation is, something all of us know and live. Today, I salute those young men and women of Tripoli who, in that simple act of sweeping the rubble off the streets of their city or visiting the wounded of yesterday’s acts of cowardice, are trying their best to achieve some form of normalcy. And isn’t normalcy what we all long for nowadays?
The above pictures have been obtained through this Facebook page.
Filed under: Lebanon Tagged: Lebanon, Salam w Takwa, Tripoli, violence