Faces of a revolution
I couldn’t help but flash back to watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on television in 1989. There was the same sense — no, the same certainty — that I was seeing history unfold. And the same goosebumps.
There’s also some of the same uncertainty, just as there was then. Just as the fall of the wall was no guarantee that the fall of the wall would bring about all that followed — the end of communism, and the spread of democracy throughout what had been the Soviet Bloc — there are likewise no guarantees as to what will unfold next in Egypt, much less across the rest of the Arab world. The prospect of a new democracy anywhere in the world, be it Tunisia, the new nation of South Sudan, or any of the other places on Earth that have been heartened by what’s happened during the last eighteen days in Egypt, is cause for hope. But it’s worth remembering that genuine democracy, the kind of democracy that’s imposed from the bottom up, and the kind that rules by obeying, may not take a form with which we’re familiar, or even comfortable, here in the States.
If we have a checkered past when it’s come to supporting dictatorships the world over (cf. Kissinger’s infamous comments on Chile for but one example), our track record other democracies has at times been equally dismal. One of the many challenges for American foreign policy, then, will be finding a way to balance the wishes of the Egyptian people with our own security. With this being said, there is such a thing as enlightened self-interest. We can, and must, find a way in the world that respects our national interests without trampling someone else’s. This includes, incidentally, respecting the will of the Egyptian people even if those wishes mean the participation of parties in their government with whom we don’t always agree.
Speaking of which, the fear currently being ginned up on the Right over democracy coming to Egypt (perhaps they’d have approved if we’d invaded instead?) looks, at least from this remove, to be unfounded. The demonstrators weren’t chanting anti-American, anti-Israeli, or anti-anything-else slogans. The only thing we heard, frequently and loudly, were calls for a tin-hat despot to get the hell outta Dodge. Calls for democracy. Calls for the simple right to self-determination. “We want what you have in America,” said one protester to the television cameras. Not our iPods, our American Idol, or a Starbucks on every corner. Just the simple right of one person/one vote self-determination.
And maybe one other thing, while they were at it: the right to hope, and the right to dream. That isn’t something the Egyptian people have taken for granted, and one gets the impression that they won’t any time soon. I’ll let an excerpt from one goosebump-raising interview, courtesy of ex-Egyptian MP Moustafa el Gindy, speak for the unalloyed joy and hope from Cairo:
“Yes, I dream. Yes, I will keep on dreaming, and I will teach my kids to dream. Yes, not a lot of people still had hope. And I was telling them, believe in your country, believe in your history… Anyone I meet, I will will tell him dream. Dreaming means you live. Dream is life, and we will dream. We are 5,000 years old civilization, and we are still dreaming and we will keep on dreaming.”
People like el Gindy, and the millions of others like him whose names will never be known to history, are an embodiment of hope. It’s a simple hope that after the dust settles, and after the unpredictable (and likely difficult) period of transition in the days and months ahead, the people of Egypt have the government that they’ve paid for in blood; a government that is equal to their hopes, dreams, struggles, and no small measure of courage.