“Crack Your Windows” and Other Drugs: How Lebanon Outsourced Survival to Its People

From practical advice to a ritual of survival

The first time I heard the phrase “crack your windows” was during the July 2006 war. Growing up in South Lebanon, it was passed around urgently, almost ritualistically—a piece of practical advice whispered from one household to another, a small act meant to prevent glass from exploding inward during Israeli airstrikes. I heard it again after the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and once more during the renewed conflict that engulfed Lebanon in 2023.

Over time, “crack your windows” has evolved far beyond its literal meaning. It has become a visceral shorthand for survival, layered with trauma, memory, and resignation. No longer just a safety precaution, it has become a psychological reflex—an emotional muscle memory triggered at the first signs of looming disaster. Each time it resurfaces, it reminds us not only of what has already been shattered, but of what has never been rebuilt.

Today, when someone says “crack your windows,” it is no longer solely about preventing physical injury. It has become the first—and often only—line of protection we are offered. A safety blanket of sorts, it is the only “real” and tangible directive consistently given amid each new disaster. It tells us how to keep our bodies intact but offers no guidance on protecting our minds from the inevitable psychological devastation: the fear, the loss, the anger, and the hollowing out of hope.

This chasm between minimal physical instruction and the vast emotional wreckage that follows is no accident. It is profoundly political. It reflects how survival in Lebanon has been systematically privatized—pushed onto individuals, families, and communities—while the state disengages, deflects, and dissolves its responsibilities.

Successive governments do not prepare people for war or disaster. They offer no credible protection plans, transparent communication, or mental health support. They refuse to admit vulnerability or prepare for it. Instead, they offer silence and denial, leaving citizens to invent their own rituals of survival. In this vacuum, phrases like “crack your windows” circulate as though it were normal to shoulder such burdens alone.

This phrase has become more than a precaution; it stands as a monument to a broken social contract. It marks the collapse of trust between people and their supposed protectors. It captures how the state has abdicated its duty to shield its citizens not just from physical harm, but from the deeper, long-lasting wounds of repeated trauma. Security in Lebanon is something you improvise, something you negotiate with your neighbors—not something you can expect from your government.

And there is something painfully tangible about “crack your windows” compared to the complete intangibility of political protection. In a country awash with slogans about resilience, dignity, and sovereignty, the only actionable instruction reliably offered is how to minimize the impact of shattering glass. We are taught how to survive in the narrowest sense, but not how to live with dignity. We are trained to expect broken windows, but never how to cope with broken futures.

The monument to a broken social contract

That, too, is political. It is easier for a government to teach—or to allow others to teach—basic survival mechanisms than to confront the true human costs of its disengagement. It is easier to treat resilience as an individual obligation than to invest in real systems of care, protection, and recovery. Encouraging survival at the margins allows the state to perform a façade of responsibility without assuming any of its actual burdens. By reducing protection to small, privatized acts—move away from the glass, hide in the stairwell, stay low to the ground—the state erases its role in the very conditions that endanger us. Collective trauma is reframed as an individual challenge. Political abandonment becomes a personal duty to endure. In doing so, the state absolves itself of accountability for the wars it tolerates, the infrastructures it neglects, and the futures it allows to crumble.

What should be systemic—protection, care, security—has been fragmented into private acts of self-preservation. Crack your windows is the emblem of this shift: a microstrategy passed from neighbor to neighbor because the state has abdicated its role in safeguarding lives. Survival has been depoliticized, atomized, and handed back to the people—not as a right secured by the state, but as a desperate, improvised act left to those long abandoned.

This breakdown reveals the hollowing out of the social contract that once tethered citizens to the state. In its classical form, the social contract promised security in exchange for allegiance. Today, that promise lies in ruins. The state still claims sovereignty and national pride but no longer offers the basic protections that sovereignty is meant to guarantee. Lebanese citizens are expected to navigate repeated disasters with little more than instinct and improvisation. Crack your windows has become a ritual mourning the death of political obligation—a quiet, tragic testament to a population governed in name but abandoned in practice.

Bracing for the blast—and the betrayal

Compounding this is the insidious weaponization of resilience. In Lebanon, endurance is celebrated—even fetishized—while the conditions that demand such endurance remain unchanged. Resilience is held up as a cultural virtue, masking chronic governance failures. Crack your windows fits neatly into this narrative: a symbol of communal strength, but also a devastating reminder of systemic neglect. The more we are praised for surviving, the less those in power are held accountable for the structures that make mere survival necessary. Endurance becomes a spectacle. Justice, protection, and healing are quietly erased from the public imagination.

Each time the phrase returns, it carries the echoes of every previous disaster. It reminds us how little has changed and how easily we are left to piece together survival while those in power move on.

Today, crack your windows is as much about preparing for the blast outside as it is about bracing for the betrayal that follows. It is a quiet, tragic recognition that in Lebanon, we are our own first responders—because no one else will be.