20: Socratic Seminars and Brotherly Love on Our Hill

The world had changed by 2021. Everyone felt it. There was no hiding from 2020 and its aftermath. The global coronavirus pandemic resulted in lockdowns around the world. Countries closed their borders. Initially, movement stopped. Eventually, the pandemic contributed to severe social and political stress that divided communities and fractured any semblance of solidarity in the efforts to address the worldwide public health crisis. This crisis manifested itself differently around the world. For some countries, the tumult was particularly acute. Lebanon was not the same country that I first visited in 2019. It was crippled in certain ways that may have been predictable but in other ways that were too far-fetched to fathom. First, the world was plunged into a global health crisis. Then, a deadly explosion at the Port of Beirut killed hundreds, injured thousands, destroyed neighborhoods and left tens of thousands of people homeless, and caused upwards of fifteen billion dollars in damages. When the warehoused ammonium nitrate exploded, it caused a seismic event felt in Turkey, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Syria, and was heard as far away in Cyprus. One of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history, this incident amputated the country from any semblance of hope that it would soon recover from the already debilitating global havoc of the pandemic. On top of this, parliament was paralyzed and ineffectual. The country descended into an economic crisis that exceeded anything the world had known in living memory. The lira’s value depreciated, electricity vanished, and once secure people’s ability to afford bread and live comfortably evaporated.