The Woman's Word: If Only It Were One Worry...

Because of our internal crises we stand in a critical and very grave position. Were it a single crisis, the matter would be easy, and every effort would join together to solve that crisis, however stubborn and complicated it might be. But it is, alas, a chain of crises, beginning with this shaken state apparatus to which, since the opening of this era, we have kept looking, waiting and hoping — to no avail — that it would bring relief and set matters right...

Among these crises, too, is the calamity of "the light," which has sharpened the tongues of journalists and critics with talk, questioning, and comment; and still, every week, we suffer hours of darkness that wring the heart and cast us out by force into the streets, into the lighted quarters, to kill the empty hours waiting for "the light"... And this crisis follows no pattern whatever, until it seems to have become one of the intractable matters — in the land of water, and in the age of electricity!!

And what shall we say of the thirty thousand unemployed, who every day expose themselves, and expose their families, to want and even to hunger, in this bitter cold, while the state, in easy negligence, does not hasten to relieve the distress by encouraging industrial and building projects, and by releasing frozen capital to revive the economic situation and to soften the people's resentment by spreading contentment... and by securing work for everyone in need?

And all this, in my view, is bearable beside the gravest of the crises, which close in on us from within and from without, and which threaten us openly with death and extinction — I mean Israel, at a stone's throw from our land... They pass their days and nights in vigilance and caution, in mobilizing and honing forces of war, in building factories for aircraft and for the latest equipment — their aim behind it all being to wipe us out of existence, to seat themselves upon our throne, and to drive us from our homeland... And we meet all this from them with a strange calm of nerves, and with a rancorous resentment that ends at the sending up of cries and protests, without our ever resolving to strengthen our defense and stand ready to repel aggression whenever it falls... As though we had not witnessed, only yesterday, the tragedy of Palestine with our own eyes, and had not heard its harrowing echo resound in our ears? As though the wounds of Palestine were not to this hour still open-mouthed, spurting blood and pus??!!

This is a bold cry, which we send forth out of a sincere national consciousness, expressing thereby the opinion of the woman of Lebanon. Will our cry find, among those responsible, a listening ear — or will it go with the wind, like our cries of times past?!