2011: The year Lebanon Allows Palestinians Some Elementary Civil Rights?
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FRANKLIN LAMB
Shatila Camp, Beirut
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Maybe
it was the really loud celebratory Ak-47 Kalashnikov and small arms gunfire and
fireworks in my South Beirut neighborhood that triggered the intense New Years
Eve nightmare. Or I guess it could have been the seemingly, just below my
bedroom window, launched RPG-7's which followed minutes past midnight on
January 1, 2011.Â
Anyhow, in my News Years dream, I was back in my
childhood home, Milwaukie, Oregon, nearly half a century ago. Our farming and
lumber town on the Willamette River had a population ofÂ
around 2000 in those much simpler and less crowded days.  I dreamt
it was Saturday afternoon and as we always did during our middle school years,
my best friend and Lake Road neighbor, David Inabnit and I went to our town's
decaying W.WII era movie theatre called the "Victory", at exactly 1 p.m.
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We stood in line to watch the Saturday Matinee, paid
the 20 cents for admission, used the dime his sainted mother Martha always gave
us for spending money and bought either Milk Duds or Good 'n' Plenty candies and
settled into the comfortable over stuffed seats.
We always enjoyed the afternoon complete with
Realtone News, a bunch of cartoons, the latest episode of an action serial like
Dick Tracy, Hopalong Cassidy or the Cisco Kid, and usually a Cowboys and
Indians movie. Or sometimes, my favorite childhood action hero, "Tarzan,
King of the Jungle." Tarzan's very pleasant friend Jane, who always seemed to
twist her angle and had to be carried by Tarzan, swinging on vines through the
treetops (Jane reminded me of Miss Whitehead, our Milwaukie Grammar School 4th
Grade teacher), was quite pretty.
But the jungle duo's screeching and too hyper
chimpanzee 'Cheetah' regularly got on my nerves. It was not until two decades
later that I learned to my horror that the film producers sometimes would beat,
drug and apply electricity to our presumed distant cousin to get the dramatic
shots they wanted. These revelations shattered my idolatry towards
"Tarzan, the Ape Man" because I figured he knew about and should have prevented
the animal abuse that his partner 'Cheetah' suffered.
My New Year's nightmare was centered on one of those
terrifying scenes (besides a giant boa constrictor slithering down a tree or
dropping from vines overhead and wrapping around and crushing someone-or a
zillion silvery flesh eating piranhas splashing in a bloody feeding frenzy and
quickly stripping their victims skeleton right there on the huge screen in
front of us) that still upsets me a lot. It was a quicksand pit scene where the
victims would sink out of sight and disappear forever while flailing their arms
and screaming--swallowed up by the shifting and sinking sand despite all their
intense struggling to save themselves.
 In my nightmare this vast quicksand pit kept
getting wider and broader. David and I were high up in the treetops watching
the swirling deathtrap cork-screwing downward as it expanded. To our horror,
futilely struggling to extricate and save themselves were thousands of soon to
be suffocated Palestinian refugees, some of whom I recognized from today's
refugee camps in Lebanon.
David and I could see in the distance people
huddled in groups and watching. They appeared to be discussing whether they
should try to rescue the condemned. But they all just stood there. Some shedding
crocodile tears as they gawked--but no one made a move to save the perishing
wretches.
Tarzan was nowhere to be seen and we kept looking
for him to swing down from the overhead vines.Â
He
never came.
This observer admits to possessing a fragile and
perhaps nightmare susceptible psyche these days, after long observing the lives
of friends in Palestinian camps in Lebanon. But it is one thing to study
the statistics, read well meaning NGO studies, and attend three dozen or so
Palestinian Rights "Workshops/Conferences" of one kind or another over the past
few years. It's quite another to share greatly valued personal
relationships with some of those whose life experiences provide the
sociological data.
NEW YEAR'S 2011 STATISTICAL UPDATE:
LEBANON "LOWEST OF THE LOWS'
In Lebanon this past summer, the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA),
conducted a socio-economic survey of 2,600 Palestinian refugee households.
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