Lebanese reactions to World Cup: Personal conclusions!

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Last Friday was the quarter final of the World Cup between Brazil and Columbia, so I went with my sister and some friends to watch the game in Beirut Water Front as we thought it would be a cool place.

When we arrived, and since we didn’t have a reservation in the VIP* part, and because we are not VIP, we bought our “ordinary” tickets and sat with the “ordinary” people at the stadium.

The place is nice, with two big screens, music and food and drinks kiosks, so we assumed that we will have a good time. What we didn’t foresee, was the age of the crowd that we were sitting with: 90% of it was aged between 13 and 20 years; I can safely say that we were the oldest group there.

I don’t need to tell you about how the Lebanese get overexcited during the World Cup, I’m a huge Brazilian fan myself, but what I witnessed Friday was far beyond a football game excitement. It was specimen of our society, of the young generation that will be responsible of our country in the future, and honestly, I was not impressed at all.

A brief description would include the presence of spoiled self-centered teenagers, many of them bragging about their smoking and drinking publicly, with expensive cell phones and cars (for those who are old enough to drive or maybe not), noisy as hell (not only when their team scores) and many of them are rude and disrespectful.

I’m writing this filled with anger and sadness. Surely, my generation is not better than theirs, nor the older generations are better than us; but the ugly truth is that our society is not moving forward, it’s recreating itself from generation to generation, recreating citizens who are only concerned by the trivial. Citizens who burn an obscene number of fireworks if the football team that they cheer for wins a game, and participate in ridiculous convoys  at 2am celebrating the achievement of another country’s football team without any regards to others.

If only we could just stop for a moment and think about our achievements. I’m not denying our right to be happy, but we owe it to ourselves above all, to build a country, a state and a modern society. We owe it to ourselves to care about what is really important for our future, and then maybe someday, we’ll burn fireworks and participate in convoys when we reach the moon or declare the end of corruption in our country.

*As you all know, in Lebanon, either you are a Very Important Person which means that you have a lot of money or willing to lavishly spend the little money that you have or you are a normal persons which is our case.

Abir Lebbos