LIFE AS A HUMAN

A River in Egypt: Revolution in the Land of the Nile

By Kerry Slavens | Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 12:10 am | 2 Comments

A revolution in Egypt has been a long time coming, but its time has come.

They kiss the soldiers. They decorate the big guns on the tanks with flowers. They raise their fists and they bow in prayer. Before our very eyes, a revolution is gathering force in Egypt, land of the Nile. But this time it is not the Nile overflowing; rather, it is the pent-up anger, fear and frustration of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians. They are flooding into the streets: men, women and children of many faiths, singing, shouting and crying for freedom.

A revolution in Egypt has been a long time coming, but its time has come. Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei knew it would:

“When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don’t have clean water, when you don’t have a sewer system, when you don’t have electricity, and on top of that you live under one of the most repressive regimes right now… Well, put all that together, and it’s a ticking bomb. It’s not of a question of threat; it is question of looking around at the present environment and making a rational prognosis.”

What is happening in Egypt should serve as a wake-up call to governments everywhere who support and indulge in oppression: once the damn breaks, the human spirit is unstoppable. Like a river seeking and surging forward, the human spirit flows toward freedom.

As William Henry Seward, a former New York governor, once said: “Revolutions never go backwards.”

Whatever occurs in Egypt from here on, there is no return to where it was. Looking at the hopeful faces of the people in the streets, we can only hope they move towards their future with the same spirit of peaceful courage with which they began this process of great change.

Photo Credit

AP Photo