Reading this, I got chills. I would like to be in Tahrir now, spending my days and nights talking to people, listening to the stories and the poems, being a part of a collective dream.
How many of us get such a chance to be present at such a moment - it would be like being part of a 10,000 voice choir, a great orchestra, where everyone is moving together in harmony to achieve one moment of perfect truth.
It’s a moment to put down the humdrum cares of the everyday world full of punishing work deadlines, squabbling children, and a never ending pile of dirty dishes. Tahrir has taken people away from their everyday lives and, in a city of 18 million souls, which would normally swallow up individual identiies - has bonded them together as a family.
Doctors and street vendors, secretaries and labourers are together, breathing the sweet smell of freedom, and it’s intoxicating. Now it remains to be seen whether it will be the pragmatists who win, or the idealists. Those who believe that change must come gradually in small increments, or those who cry, “carpe diem“- sieze the day.
on Feb 8th, 2011 at 10:01 pm
This rallying cry has now slipped through the protestors’ fingers, and is now in the grip of the Mubarak forces, who have stabilized against the first few days of the uprising. The group to be with now to witness history, and yes, even in something of a romantic manner, is in the planning and stategy rooms, making structural order inside the brewing chaos all around. It is in the close quarters where nerves of steel are being played out and proven in their mettle. Leadership and resorcefullness is being put to the test unprecedendented at any other time during the Murbarak regime. How the people operate under this pressure and decision making time constraints, will determine how the republic will emerge in the near future able to face the fears and expectations the world holds for its stability and freedoms. The protestors can only offer a vaccum towards an unknown future through not having a stable opposition able to take the reigns of power through a transitionary electoral process. The poetic romanticism of a time manning the baricades when the protestors can no longer control the outcomes of their resulting demands, leaves the government strategists living the drama of balancing Egypt on a democratic tightrope, pressured domestically and internationally to maintain a status quo workable and progressively viable. This is where heroes are made as careers are shone upon or dashed. The poetry here is in the dialogue of the political decisions and historical consequences being fashioned at the verge of the ultimate breaking point of a society of some 84 million some souls being kept in a cohesive framework it is in turn, intent upon seeing overturned towards something no one is certain of. “Carpe diem” is in a locked contest between the masses and the elite, with history as the prize for the victors.