It was another social movement flashpoint, a break in the future, in which his interlocutors' past disappointments and narratives of disappointment informed their actions.

And initially, a more NGO-like coordinating group called Dilettere Hadkon, You Stink, Your Smell Rises, right, but called You Stink in English, kind of started doing symbolic protests of throwing trash bags into Parliament Square.

You know, powerful symbolic stuff, no doubt, but didn't really get a lot of traction with some of the kind of more direct action-y groups because of their previous involvement in some of these actions.

As the trash crisis continued over the summer in August, late August, particularly when the kind of street movement, the Hirak, really started to be opposed quite dramatically by both state and non-state security forces in Lebanon, including the use of water cannon, rubber bullets against people.

The Atelet Rehatcon representatives absent of themselves, kind of quite explicitly stating, we are removing ourselves from this space because we have lost control.

The kind of other group of people within the oppositional space, the people who I'd spent more of my time with, had already seen this play out two years earlier.

And so rather than being themselves taken by surprise by it this time, they were ready for it.

Since the uprising of October 2019, Lebanon has experienced a full financial crash, COVID-19, the August 2020 Beirut port explosion, still unaccounted for, and ongoing Israeli bombardment and occupation.