Priorities of the Lebanese Peasants? Shooting Migratory Bee-Eater Birds

It's an average of one shot per second. It's incessant. At this time, visiting the Nahr El-Kalb (Dog River) valley and its upstream villages below Beit Shabab and Bickfaya, it's been a week in which throughout the day and especially in the evening (when the migrating birds come down to rest for the night), the Christian peasants who inhabit the valley set their priority on shooting down the passing bee-eater birds (وروار) migrating to Africa for winter.

There have been many campaigns to deter these savages who kill any flying bird as a hobby, but those with influence over the local neanderthals - the local feudal lord, the religious bosses, or the religious schools - never tell or instruct "their" herd to stop this barbaric annual ritual. Just as they don't teach them to stop throwing trash every which way they go. Primitive habits endure and are transmitted generation to generation. And these are the same Christians (who are Christian only in name) of this country who constantly claim that they are so much better and civilized than the Muslims.

You can wear jeans, you can suck up Pepsi and scarf down burgers, you can drive cool huge SUVs, you can monkey-imitate every stupid thing that Hollywood sends your way, can do all the superficial things that will make you look like a mediocre imitation of a "westerner", but eastern-mediterranean barbarism is resilient in your genes like stink on a monkey.

At this time when the country is facing an imminent and potentially devastating and existential war, the priorities of the riff-raff peasants in these mountains is to go out on a Sunday after a boring mass at the church and shoot down those birds flying between continents. In Lebanon, the purpose of education is to train the students in a minimum level of instruction to enable them to get a job, but not to become  responsible, cultured citizens. They teach them Arabic so they can emigrate and work in the Muslim Gulf whose inhabitants they dislike. They teach them French so they can emigrate and work in Europe and lick the boots of the Europeans. They teach them English so they emigrate and work in North America, Canada and Australia. And the whole point of this system is for the expatriate children to send money back to this unproductive corrupt country where their relatives spend the money on stupid me-too monkey consumer items, sit in cafés to smoke the water pipes and show off to the Joneses. They call this "to love life", meaning to live a deeply individualistic life without any sense of communal solidarity with others around them.