حرية بمصر

The word Tahrir means liberation. It is a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom. And forevermore it will remind us of the Egyptian people -- of what they did, of the things that they stood for, and how they changed their country, and in doing so changed the world.

-President Barack Obama, 2/11/2011


This is one of those speeches by the President that makes me so proud to have voted for him. The situation in Egypt has pulled me back into a semi-regular state of engagement with the outside world, something I'd been avoiding since the end of 2010. Don't get me wrong, I loved Dear Mr President and I loved writing it, but some days the constant drone of talking points, talking heads, the Huffington Post making an INSANELY LARGE HEADLINE and reading the same story as told by the left, the right, the White House, the mainstream media and the blogosphere... well... it got kind of exhausting. I certainly began suffering the delusion that I was a more active participant rather than just a little person watching from the sidelines. So I took a break.

On New Year's Eve I drank a little too much and had just slightly more fun than I should have (and maybe just slightly less fun than others present would have liked.) I felt 24 again instead of ancient. The new quarter started at UW and instead of continuing my really embarrassing streak of oversleeping/skipping class, I attended each and every one. My classes right now are amazing. And then, 18 days ago, I came to history after an all-night-paper-writing session, exhausted but thrilled to have my paper done on time, and my professor asked who else had heard what was happening in Egypt.

No one said anything.

"God, you guys, would it kill you to LOOK at the front page of a newspaper once in a while?" I tried to explain it- I'd just spent a year doing nothing but read the news, see, I wasn't one of those willfully misinformed kinds. If it sounded half as bad out loud as it does in my memory, well, it's amazing I can still face the rest of that class.

Anyway, I tuned back in. Opened the paper, surfed the internet, hit refresh on the news sites obsessively and silently thanked Dr. Marcy Newman for adding me as her facebook friend every time she posted another twitter update. (Dr. Newman is second only to Al-Jazeera, I think.)

At work, in school, in the cafe seating on my lunch break, I started talking to people. "What have you heard? What do you think? What do you hope?" Information, slogans, rumors, predictions, opinions passed and retold and carried from one friend or stranger to the next.

The Revolution was happening and we could do nothing but wait and watch.

Today Hosni Mubarak stepped down. I've never been so awed. The Egyptian people are inspiring. They dared to dream of a better country and lived (and died) to see it done.

What, my friends, what the hell, have we been waiting for?


I want to vent a little anger, now, about every idiot suggesting that Egyptian Democracy is something we ought to fear or try to prevent. Maybe we should fear it, we who have paid so much to see them so oppressed for so long, but they have earned this in decades of martial law, spent in dark, secret cells, never to be heard from again. They have earned this in 18 days of resistance, of peace, in the face of bullets and chaos and fear and doubt. They have earned a Democracy with their dignity and their courage. Who are we to question that?

I believe that every nation should be ruled by a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Considering what we have allowed our own government to become, I'm not sure American Democracy shouldn't be the greater nightmare.

!مبارك, يا مصر