This order ensures that responding to citizens’ needs takes a back seat — and every chieftain and his cronies gets their pockets lined. Unemployment is rampant. And Lebanon’s top 1 percent earn about 25 percent of the gross domestic product, making it one of the most unequal economies in the world.

I say protests, but on the ground, we are calling it “thawra,” revolution. Not without reason: Lebanon has seen a devastating, 15-year-long sectarian civil war, and the warlords who caused the deaths of 150,000 people and disappeared 17,000 more are the same oligarchs who have helped plunge the country into $86 billion of debt, using the specter of war to dissuade citizens from organizing against them.

The fact that people have come together from across the country and across all sectarian lines in enormous numbers with the demand to unseat them — all of them — is nothing short of revolutionary.

We are without doubt on the precipice of disaster. Already supermarket shelves are sparser and prices are rising by the day. Many people’s salaries are being slashed; others are being fired outright. Hospitals warn that they will soon be running out of medication, including anesthetic, because they don’t have enough dollars to pay for imports.

Many businesses are no longer accepting card payments. My husband and I managed to pull out our meager savings in dollars before the last round of strikes. We now exchange them, $100 at a time, on the black market. Every time we change money, we receive shocking evidence of how fast the lira is devaluing, though the governor of the central bank continues to insist that the Lebanese lira is still pegged to the dollar at the official rate of 1,507.5 per dollar.

But the powerful, angry energy on the streets and at the protest sites is the most transformative, wildly optimistic thing I have ever experienced in my life. For years I felt a sense of shame when I remembered that conversation with the bank manager — being told that a person was worth exactly what was in their bank account, that my financial struggles were a question of individual failure rather than systemic forces.

Out in the squares, which have turned into giant, open-air classrooms with lectures and open dialogue sessions — on the constitution, the economy, the legal system — being held long into the night, I, along with so many others, am being unburdened of that shame. The isolating sense of feeling personally responsible for my inability to improve my financial situation, regardless of how hard I work, is being replaced with a sense of collective responsibility to expose and change the inequalities of the system we allow to regulate our lives.