THE BREEZES OF LIBERTY
(are turning into a hurricane of revolution)

Despite the Mubarak regime and foreign wishful-thinking calls for orderly minuet steps towards – democracy- the people of Egypt are having none of that.

Having felt the breezes of liberty by their initial civil disobedience and now massive demonstrations of protest, those breezes are steadily turning into a hurricane of revolution against the Mubarak regime. And once unleashed and set in motion, such a hurricane will inexorably hurl its forces against anything and everything in its path, until it blows itself out on the shores of some unknown new political structure.

What such a new political structure may end up being, no one really knows right now. Everyone just hopes and prays it will end with a positive and gratifying result. That is, as a new political structure that can provide the people of Egypt with a free, open, and civil society of their own make and model. One which can turn their unique history and culture into a dynamic engine of renaissance for themselves, and the rest of the Arab world besides.

This may, indeed, be wishful thinking, because the historical odds are against them. Such hurricane forces of revolutionary upheaval have rarely ended with a good result, without a lot of bloodshed and destructive chaos. In such a matrix the viruses of factionalism and conflicting ideologies too often emerge, only to bring about a new form of repression often worse than the one before. We can only hope Egypt will be spared such a fate.

In our case, we Americans somehow managed to avoid it ourselves (well, perhaps not, since we eventually suffered a long and vicious civil war to thrash out matters which should have been settled at the beginnings of our republic).

So perhaps the best thing for us to do now, as a measure of the sincerity of our support for their aspirations, is to openly paraphrase what a late former president said to the Soviets:
“Mr. Mubarak, tear down your repressive walls!”

CENTURION