Earthqakes and News Breaks

My promise to blog every few days before I leave was interrupted by my adorable one year old niece Madeline. She fell off the bed and bumped her tiny little head. A late night in the hospital, prompted my brother and his wife to ask me to babysit early this morning, so instead of blogging, I went to sleep and took care of my beautiful niece bright and early.

Here is the little ham sleeping in her cow print car seat. She was obviously tuckered out as well.

With that said can we talk about the overreaction to the earthquake.

Yesterday, I received an absolutely frantic call from my dad (my dad lives in Lebanon). My dad’s friend called him to tell him about the earthquake and my dad called me in a panic. My dad was genuinely worried about my well being. Now, my dad is not a funny or light-hearted person so I took the opportunity to screw with him. I told him that the pictures fell off the wall, the china cabinet had fallen over and the house was in utter disrepair. My dad flipped out and started screaming, “OMG, is your brother okay? How’s the baby? He’s not answering his phone. OMG is he okay?!?!”

You can imagine that my laughter caught him off guard. I informed my dad that I thought the washing machine was broken as opposed to an earthquake and I was sure my brother thought that my niece’s little farts probably just shook the room. If you know my dad at all, he was so pissed off at me for joking because he was led to believe that an earthquake had devastated the East Coast.

This is a little lesson in how news travels. This is not the first time news has been distorted from one country to the next. I promised I would tell you about my past trips to Lebanon and this is the perfect opportunity. While visiting my dad in Lebanon this past January, the government collapsed. Hezbollah forced a slew of ministers to resign from the cabinet in an effort to protest the United Nations ruling on the 2005 death of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. (Rafik Hariri spent millions and millions of his own $$ trying to rebuild Lebanon. My dad worked for Rafik Hariri in the 80’s. And for my HOBY friends, the Hariri Foundation sends a HOBY ambassador to WLC every year). A UN tribunal found both Hezbollah and Syria to blame for the death of Hariri yet Hezbollah denied any involvement and said the tribunal was an Israeli-American tool of hate. Blah, blah, blah. Whoever is to blame is not up to me to decide or even care about. What I do care about though was the sheer panic the American news media made about the collapse of the Lebanese government.

I read article after article stating that there had been “riots in the streets of Beirut,” and frequently about how “the unstable government was going to disrupt life in Lebanon and the country would fall apart.” Listen, I was in Beirut when the government fell. I had to read American news to hear about any riots. I was eating birthday cake when the government collapsed. And I consulted my aunt the head of the physics department at Universite Libanese (The Lebanese University) about life was going to be different after the collapse of the government. She said this, “the government changes often. Life will not be any different. We just know the government will not take care of us so we take care of ourselves.”

However the people of Lebanon feel about the collapse of the government may change from person to person but I felt the overall mentality was that “we are going to be okay, just like we always are.” It is interesting how news can become so twisted so quickly. Will you believe what you hear the first time or will you challenge yourself to hear many different views and form your own opinion?