Published Mar 4, 2005
After years of letting Syria treat Lebanon as a virutal province, our President is finally suggesting that they leave. It’s about time! If Clinton had just done the same thing, I wouldn’t have almost gotten married back in college.
My sophomore year of college, I dated this one girl who treated me not so great. Next door to this girl there was this guy who was treating this girl he was dating not so great too. Me and this girl, Sandy, used to hang out in the lounge outside our ill-behaved paramours’ rooms and commiserate.
So, over a few years, Sandy and I became friends. Sandy was a nice Lebanese girl who grew up in Beirut during the civil war there. She had some great stories — one time, a girl mouthed off to Sandy; this girl had grown up in a disadvantaged urban area and criticized Sandy as a spoiled little rich girl who didn’t know what it was like to live in a place where people got shot. Whereupon Sandy told this girl the story of how her house had been shelled by the Israeli Army. Good times, good times.
Now, during the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli and Syrian armies moved into Lebanon and effectively enforced peace. Sandy’s family is Christian, and the Christians more or lest lost the civil war; the Syrians supported a Muslim militia. Sandy feared for her safety if she returned to Lebanon, but she was in the US on a student visa.
One day, Sandy got her new Lebanese passport; it wasn’t the green passport she grew up with, but a red one, the same color as the Syrian passport. She felt this was a sign that her country would soon be absorbed into Syria. How could she stay in the US? Well, maybe if she got hitched. So we hatched a plan to get married.
Then those darned English let her into grad school. And I ended up single to this very day.