I Love Egypt’s Revolution

How can you not love a Revolution wherein a human chain forms to protect its museums and priceless antiquities?  A mob that thinks to maintain its history and culture, even in their anger and confusion?

How do you not love revolutionaries who form a citizen police force, because they don’t want looters or violence and their government has abandoned them and their safety?

How is it possible for your heart not to ache for the Christians who are human shields to protect their Muslim countrymen while in prayer, repaying a favor from Christmas Eve of this past year?

I think this revolution is beautiful.  People keep asking me, who are the good guys?  Isn’t Mubarak better than the Muslim Brotherhood?  Is it safe over there?  These people are the good guys; the people who protect their countrymen, their history and their homes.  These people who want real democracy because their “president” has not left office in 30 years.

Mubarak isn’t better than the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood.  But that’s irrelevant, because MB didn’t organize this, and they don’t want to come to power.  This was organized in what was once a small facebook group, by students on twitter, by men smoking hookah in cafes, and by women bringing their children to school.

This isn’t about religion or extremism or fundamentalism or Islamism or hating America or being lazy or getting violent.  This is about food shortages and housing shortages and high unemployment and constantly being watched and martial law and slaughtering the pigs and a guy with an AK on every street corner.  This is about opposing to all of that peacefully and in great unity, about tahrir fee Tahrir: Liberation in Liberation Square.

This is quite possibly the most graceful and glorious revolution of our time, and we have the privilege to watch it on tv, hear the cries of the people on the radio, and read about it across all forms of the internet.  And I don’t just think it’s a privilege, I think it is an obligation.  I feel obligated to spread anything I learn, and to pay even more attention every time the internet is turned off.

I hope you will join me.