The events in Egypt are beyond breathtaking, that a people so long oppressed have by themselves risen up to cast off their oppressors. Surging through the streets in uncountable thousands, burning police stations to the ground, convincing army troops of their commonality, spontaneously organizing themselves to protect property, direct traffic, and deal with emergencies, smoking out Mubarak’s attempt to capitalize on the inevitable looting and violence, they are revealing to the world a new national template: self-organization. A template we know operates in biology and ecology but have never before seen realized on such a scale among human beings.
Because above all, beyond struggling to get rid of Mubarak and free themselves from their addiction to American money and armaments, the Egyptian people have glimpsed the possibility that they can do all this without falling back on traditional political parties. Even as an idea, even as an ideal, this is the most extraordinary aspect of what is taking place. A movement born out of youth and led by youth, without recourse to professional leaders, the Egyptian revolution presents us with the possibility of living in an entirely new way, of circumventing a 6000-year-old model in which “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
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It’s not surprising that, filled with emotion, the demonstrators wrap themselves in the national flag. Oh, the flag, the flag! In Tunisia and Egypt and every other country, this piece of cloth held up as a symbol of national identity, conflating who we are with an abstraction for which we must be prepared to lay down our lives. But sooner or later this too will fall by the wayside.
Sooner or later, without feeling in danger of losing our national identities, customs, and languages, we will understand that our allegiance belongs to something larger than those symbols which separate us, symbols co-opted by warring nation-states for perpetuation of the status quo. Sooner or later, without the paranoid fantasy of one world government, a new flag—the image of a luminous globe floating in black space—will be raised over the planet. And we will perhaps begin, at long last and as best we can, to organize our lives around our common humanity.
What the Egyptian Revolution Means by Michael Brownstein
