For you, it might be 40 seconds on the news.

For us, the Lebanese, it is reality from the day we were born.

For you, it’s easy to say, “That country is always at war.”

For us, it is the weight of regional and international political agendas destroying the peace we deserve.

While the world changes the channel, there are mothers here holding their children a little tighter in fear; families who do not know if they will still have a place called home the next day; and children who learn to say far too early the sound of sirens and explosions.

For you, it may feel distant. Rather, none of your business.

For us, every day is about surviving and hoping that somewhere in the world, someone still feels empathy.

We never wanted war.

We only want to live in peace like everyone else in the world.

Honestly, I sometimes wonder how Lebanese do it – maintain our mind, and not sink into madness.

War is something deeply personal for us. We are no longer interested in pointing fingers or arguing about who is to blame. What we know is this: you have stolen our childhood, our teenage years, and our adulthood. Every stage of our lives has been marked and shattered by one conflict or another.

It is hard to explain the exhaustion of living your entire life with the quiet fear that next year, maybe even next month, there will be another war. Imagine building a life, while constantly anticipating when it will all collapse again.

It is absurd that we have to beg the world for something as basic as peace of mind.

Our lives have been defined by things no generation should repeatedly endure: invasions by neighboring countries, a civil war fueled by outside powers, years of occupation, the collapse of our institutions, the bankruptcy of our country, banks failing overnight and taking our life savings with them, the collapse of the Lebanese pound, the Beirut explosion, and now again the shadow of war and displacement, threatening to push us toward yet another civil conflict.

We have spent our lives rebuilding from disasters we never chose.

“Khalas,” as we say in Lebanese. Enough.

Please, if there is still any humanity left in this world, have mercy on us.

Let us live one generation without war.

So, dear world,

We were born on the wrong side of the world, taken hostage by local, regional, and international powers. To tell you the truth, our nervous systems are shattered; we are drained to the core. Instead of saying, “I wish my parents were alive,” I often find myself saying, “Thank God my parents are gone, so they don’t have to live through another war.”

We have seen it all, and we are exhausted by this absurd, relentless reality — where our land becomes the battleground for everyone else’s wars. Do us a favor: if the world insists on destroying us, then end it once and for all. Finish it with your nuclear weapons. It would be kinder than dying a little every day, from the moment we are born until the destined end.

My mother spent the last years of her life worrying about us. Even on quiet days, there was always fear behind her eyes — the kind of fear that never really leaves someone who has lived through too many wars. She worried about where we would be if the bombs started again, about whether we would be safe, about whether our country would ever know peace. I often think that part of her heart broke long before her body did, worn down by decades of uncertainty and fear for her children.

My father carried a different kind of wound. He never had the chance to return to his hometown, Haret Hreik, the place where he grew up and built his early life before the civil war took everything from him. His home, his memories, his sense of belonging, lost in a conflict that was never truly ours to begin with. I remember the way his voice softened whenever he spoke about it, as if he were describing a place that only existed now in memory.

These are the quiet tragedies that statistics never show. Not just destroyed buildings, but broken hearts, interrupted lives, and parents who spent their final years carrying worries they should have never had to carry.

And still, we remain here — tired, grieving, but holding on to the fragile hope that one day the next generation will inherit something different: a country where peace is not a dream, but simply life. – Image credit: Wikipedia – Christiane Waked is a Lebanese French columnist and political analyst who covers the MENA region.