Letter to the Young Lebanese Abroad
Exile is not only loss. It can become the place where the cartel cannot reach the sentence before it is written.
Dear you,
You left because the country made staying feel like a punishment for loyalty. You left for salaries, medicine, electricity, papers that move, streets that function, courts that answer, futures that do not require a cousin in an office.
Then you felt guilty for breathing easier.
Do not romanticize exile. It is a wound with good infrastructure. You will miss stupid things: the way someone says your name, the bread, the sea appearing between buildings, the shamelessness of home. You will also become freer in ways you should not waste.
Distance can make people shallow. It can turn Lebanon into nostalgia, cuisine, rage, and WhatsApp politics. But distance can also make you harder to recruit. The local cartel has fewer tools over you. It cannot threaten your job as easily. It cannot deny your permit. It cannot send your aunt to shame you at lunch. It cannot make you dependent on its charity to fix your roof.
Use that freedom.
Fund institutions, not factions. Read history, not only headlines. Refuse the binary when it arrives in the family chat wearing urgency as perfume. Build archives. Support journalists. Translate serious work. Teach your children a Lebanon larger than the sect that claims them and more honest than the tourism poster.
You are not outside the story. You are one of the places where the next version of it can be drafted.
With expectation, Karim
