Imagine a lawnmower. A loud, gas-guzzling lawnmower. Now, imagine your neighbor decides to run that lawnmower twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But he doesn’t mow the grass. He just leaves it running right outside your bedroom window. You would go crazy, right? You would lose your mind. You would probably do something drastic.

Now, imagine that lawnmower is actually a flying robot in the sky that might or might not have a missile attached to it. That is what life is like in Beirut right now. And here is the punchline: they call this "peace."

It has been more than a year since the so-called cease-fire. A cease-fire is supposed to be when the fighting stops. It is when the guys in the expensive suits meet in a fancy hotel, sign a piece of paper, shake hands for the cameras, and tell us all to go back to work. They tell us everything is fine. They tell us the war is over. But in Beirut, the war just changed shape. It turned into a mechanical buzzing sound that never goes away. It hangs over the city like a bad smell that you just cannot scrub out of the carpet.

This is the problem with the modern world. We love to change the definitions of words to make ourselves feel better. We don't call it "war" anymore unless things are exploding every five minutes. If there are just killer robots watching you drink your coffee, we call that "stability." It is a joke. It is a sick, twisted joke played on normal people by leaders who don't have to live under the noise.

Think about the level of stupidity required to accept this as normal. You have an entire city of people trying to live their lives. They are trying to go to the grocery store. They are trying to have dates. They are trying to sleep. And the whole time, there is this mechanical whirring noise above their heads. It is a reminder. It is the other side saying, "We are still here. We are watching you. We haven't pressed the button today, but we could." It is psychological torture dressed up as security.

And what do the people do? They get used to it. That is the saddest part of the whole story. Humans are pathetic. We can get used to anything. If you hit your thumb with a hammer every day for a year, eventually you would just stop complaining about the pain and start expecting it. In Beirut, people don't even look up anymore. The drone is just part of the sky now, like the sun or the clouds or the smog. They have normalized the idea that they are being hunted, or at least tracked, every second of the day.

This is why I don't trust politicians. I don't care if they are on the Left or the Right. The Left will tell you they are working on a diplomatic solution, which means absolutely nothing. It means they are sending emails while the drones keep flying. The Right will tell you it is necessary for safety, which is just code for "we like our expensive military toys." Both sides are happy to let normal people live in a state of constant, low-level panic. They don't care about the noise. They don't hear the buzzing in their quiet offices.

It makes you wonder what the point of a "cease-fire" actually is. If the threat is still there, hovering over your head, did the war end? No. The war just got lazy. The war decided to sit in a chair and watch instead of run around and shoot. But the fear is the same. The control is the same. The message is the same: you are small, and we are big, and we are always watching.

We have spent billions of dollars on technology. We have the smartest engineers in the world. And what did we build? We built a way to annoy and terrify people from the clouds without ever setting foot on the ground. We turned the sky into a prison. It’s efficient, I guess. It’s very modern. It’s also completely soulless.

So, the next time you hear a politician talk about peace in the Middle East, or peace anywhere really, just remember the buzzing. Remember that their version of peace includes a flying camera that never blinks. Remember that they think you are stupid enough to believe that just because the bombs stopped falling, the violence stopped. It didn't. The violence just got quieter. Well, not that quiet. It sounds like a lawnmower that won't die. And nobody with the power to stop it cares enough to pull the plug.