Instead of wholeheartedly embracing and riding the wave of the Arab Spring, Lebanon turned into a spectator, cheering for this historic development but nevertheless treating it as some foreign event.

We saw and continue to see ourselves above the Arab Spring. We enjoy religious freedoms and political liberties in Lebanon. Therefore, unlike Tunisians, Libyans, Yemenis, Egyptians, Syrians and other fellow Arabs, we have no battle to fight, no cause to champion, so it seems. Surely we can implement reforms to fix our economic problems and make our bureaucracy more effective, but deep down we continue to believe that our sectarian political system, while imperfect, is fundamentally sound and even worth emulating by others. Change is good, but it is not for us.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The reality is that our system is rotten and the tragedy is that nobody wants to change it, except of course for a few well-intentioned civil society activists and Lebanese, including myself, living abroad. It is easy to assign blame on our corrupt politicians and foreign governments for our enormous economic debt and chronic political instability. But let’s be candid and look ourselves in the mirror. We have failed to fulfill our country’s promise — that of prosperity, tolerance, and pluralism in the Middle East — not because of our government, Israel, Iran, or Syria but because of who we are, a sectarian people that judges on the basis of sect, allocates political rights on the basis of sect, marries on the basis of sect, and loves, hates, and fears on the basis of sect.

In social gatherings, we do not miss an opportunity to express our disgust with our norms, rules and traditions. Yet if we truly find them so abhorrent, why don’t we change them? What is stopping us? We claim to be a democratic society that freely elects its leaders, then why don’t we elect the good guys to office and ask them to change our laws that force us to elect a Christian Maronite for president, a Sunni for prime minister, and a Shiite for Parliament speaker? The honest answer is because the Lebanese don’t want to. Our leaders, who we love to hate, are only a reflection of us.