The Best at Failing

There is alot of change happening around the world.

I went walking this morning and was thinking about Egypt and people I know and what I've been through the past couple of years-- the recession and pop culture. (That's my wandering mind for ya!)

And I thought about this idea that the Egyptian people are just "protesting". Call it what you want, but the message is "Stop!" to a 30 year old totalitarean regime, or mutiny if you consider the regime's point of view and how they're going to respond. That's like telling an old clunker steam locomotive to "Stop." It's going to run over you no matter how nicely you tell it. And my guess is that the "protestors" are counting on the leverage of the global community to step in and help put the breaks on the regime's momentum.

My concern is that there is a full generation of Egyptian people that are passengers to this momentum, and while they may not like the ride anymore, there is a period of knowing what to do that they have to decide for themselves. When you remove a way of being from your life, you can't just leave it empty, there needs to be an activity to replace it, lest you relapse into the habit again. (spoken like a true addict?) The real danger lies in that the youth of Egypt do not possess a true sense of responsibilty to model themselves after, therefore will imitate what they think power should mean and exhibit an impulsive fascism within their sense of freedom... a snapback to the tension of living under the regime. And so an emergency "governor" (think combustable engines) will have to regulate the chaos of mass "freedom". There will be times of desperation to return to the comfort of having the "iron fist" make the decisions and so older Egyptians will exhibit fundamentalist strategies of promoting more regulation to regain what they think is a rational sense of order. It's very hard for me to watch, because I know this pain. I know the liminal states of internalized conflict. These people have not matured to their capacity as a society to know what to do, and while it is my hope that they continue to gain perspective in their vision of a better society, I know those same growing pains, when it seems that all roads lead to failure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NWZRvRHbRY