A’dam wrap-up

Way too much fun with Dina and Jean-Baptiste: an old friend and a new one. That was about 3.5 hours longer than I’d wanted with a big travel day tomorrow, but so it goes.

And we caught up on even more revolution stories. Anyone with any personal Egypt connection is part of a fraternity now, including those who were abroad during the recent events. We’re all still trying to sort through what it means and what will happen next. But it’s been a life-changing experience for all of us.

One thought that a lot of us are expressing is this: what were we thinking? How did we ever think that the prior situation was even remotely acceptable? Not everyone did, of course. There were always activists, many of them extremely brave in the things they were willing to do. But for large portions of the population, there’s this remarkable experience of retroactively asking: “Why on earth did anyone put up with X, Y, and Z in Egypt for so many years?”

Tonight we were also united in our optimism. There’s simply no way the populace will let things go back to what they were or even fail to move forward. Already we’ve seen the protestors go back to Tahrir to keep the army honest, and on each occasion the protestors have won. That dynamic is likely to continue. There is reason to fear the public now, for the first time.

In any case, I’ve never been involved in such a long-running, ongoing series of political discussions with so many people I know as has been the case from January 25 to now. It’s one thing to theorize, but quite a lot more serious when your life-world has actually been shaken by events and you have personal stakes in what has happened.