"Baby Shark": Anthem Of The Nationals And Also Of... Major Protests In Lebanon Right Now?

There are two major Baby Shark hotspots in the world right now, and under very different circumstances… but at the heart of it the reasons are actually pretty similar.

Bare with me for a quick recap on the D.C. Baby Shark hotspot via the Washington Post, then we’ll zip to the other side of the globe where I’ll explain the pretty cool story behind what’s happening with it there:

Washington was 33-38 and 8½ games out of first place in the NL East. [Gerardo] Parra, who was signed by the Nationals in May after he was released by the San Francisco Giants, was mired in an 0-for-22 slump and requested a new walk-up song before the first game of a doubleheader at home against the Philadelphia Phillies.

“I think God send to me,” Parra said recently of choosing “Baby Shark,” a nod to his 2-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, instead of another Reggaeton or hip-hop song like he has used throughout most of his 11-year major league career.

There couldn’t have been more than 5,000 people in the stands when Parra stepped to the plate to lead off the second inning that day. Neither the Nationals’ TV nor radio broadcasts mentioned the song, which preceded a routine groundout to first base.

From there, as we all know, things took off on an upwards trend & it became a good luck charm of sorts…

And a cultural phenomenon in the D.C. area, where it’s even been played on the National Cathedral’s 10,250 pipe organ…

So as the Nationals head into game 2 it’s only grown as a rally cry uplifting our nation’s capital city… a city that has never won a World Series.

Meanwhile, in a strange twist, Baby Shark has also become a rally cry at another nation’s capital city on the other side of the world; Lebanon.

For starters, here’s the simplified Wikipedia account of what’s happening there right now:

The 2019 Lebanese protests are a series of country-wide, non-sectarian protests in response to the government’s failure to find solutions to an economic crisis that has been looming for the past year. It is suspected that the direct trigger to the protests were due to the planned imposed taxes on gasoline, tobacco and online phone calls such as through WhatsApp, as country-wide protests broke out right after Cabinet talks of the taxes.

Thus, since October 17th residents of Lebanon have been taking to the streets and voicing their frustrations with the government.

In the midst of all this, a woman named Eliane Jabbour was driving across the Lebanese capital, Beirut, with her toddler when she got stuck in the sea of protests. She told them, “I have a baby, don’t be too loud”, and sensing the mom’s concern & the child’s fear, the protesters on the street started singing what they probably sing at home to their own kids; Baby Shark…

The video of that moment went viral so quickly Jabbour’s husband saw it before she even made it home. Since then it’s been a theme song of the protests on the streets these last few nights & it’s a surreal thing to see:

Scrolling across ‘Lebanese Protest Twitter’ it’s been interesting to see that dance, musicians, & DJs have been a huge part of this movement so far, too. Free EDM concerts off balconies & on the backs of trucks have been a way to get people centralized while keeping things energized & positive in the face of threats from local militias.

In the major cities there like Tripoli & Beirut, groups like the Harley motorcycle clubs & local families are getting out to clean up the streets each morning after the protests, and when the military starts moving & arresting people they just put their hands up & say “peaceful, peaceful”. Pretty amazing.

As much as this painfully sugary sweet, repetitive song brings adults worldwide to the brink of their already-fragile sanity, they put up with their hate for it over, and over, and over, and over… and they do that out of love.

Love for his daughter was the motivation for Perra to play it as his walkup music, and love for a toddler was the motivation for a large group of protestors in Lebanon to sing it out in the middle of a movement.

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PS: I wasn’t sure how to include this without seeming to come out of the clouds with it or lessen the importance, but stories like the ones above are especially important to remember today, on the 26th anniversary of the devastating Beiruit bombings.

On October 23rd, 1983, an Iranian national named Ismail Ascari rammed a vehicle into the 1st Battalion 8th Marine barracks & detonated nearly 21,000lbs of explosives. 241 American service members, there on a peacekeeping mission, were killed. (A similar attack on a French barracks a few miles away killed 58 of their service members as well.)

They were there on a peace-keeping mission.

Remembering the men & women who put it all on the line for peace as two nation’s capitals on opposite ends of the globe take to the streets singing the – improbably – hottest love song of 2019.