What are the Egyptians doing on their first Saturday of freedom?
February 12, 2011 in Egypt, Film and Theater
We get this report from Aljazeera:
Mohammed Ramadan, a film maker, wrote on his facebook page: “I am going to clean the square in a bit… everyone bring plastic bags… mops… or anything that we could use.“
**************************************************************
And this is what is so beautiful about the overwhelming majority of the Egyptian people! They take responsibility for themselves, for each other, and now for their government. Just as they worked together to sweep the trash out of their government, today they are working to clean up the trash in their streets–much of which was made by the thugs representing Mubarak.
With their revolution they have established the right relationship between themselves and those who will represent them in their government: It is the “government” who are afraid of the people [if indeed anyone is to be afraid] and not the other way around.
I hope that more Americans will follow the example of the Egyptian people in 2012 and fully participate in their own democracy. The only way a Democracy can work is if the MAJORITY of the people fully participate. In the USA we have fully one third of all voters eligible to vote who don’t even vote–much less participate by running for office and/or supporting candidates that they personally know. This will not be the case for the Egyptian people. They will have majority representation because the majority of the people will turn out to vote–just as they recently did in South Sudan which had a 99% voter turn out.
You can bet that there will be little or no ballot fraud–such as is rampant here in the USA. Why? Because the Egyptian people will be watching the polls. They will be guarding their democracy which is something that more Americans need to do. When we have a Senate that will almost unanimously vote to defund ACORN [an organization whose only crime is to empower poor people and register them to vote] solely on the basis of an implausible video created by James O’Keefe, a known right-wing operative–well that should tell more than a few of us that we need to do a lot of sweeping of our own government halls in order to restore representation of the majority.
The USA has 261 millionaires representing us in DC as elected officials. I daresay that every single one of the members of Obama’s cabinet are millionaires as well. This is not representative of the cross section of the people of the United States of America any more than Mubarak and his cabinet were representative of the people of Egypt. This is representation of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. Almost 50% of our nation are NOT millionaires.
In 2012, I hope that more ordinary Americans will run for office–and I don’t mean Koch sponsored Tea Party fakes. I mean real Americans with real solutions beyond cutting taxes for the rich and removing social programs for the poorest among us.
THANK YOU ONCE AGAIN EGYPT FOR REMINDING US IN THE USA WHAT A REAL DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE. THANK YOUR FOR REMINDING US THAT WE OWN THE AIR WAVES AND THAT POLLUTANTS LIKE FOX NEWS ARE THERE ONLY BECAUSE WE SAY THEY CAN BE.
*************************************************************
A PASSING THOUGHT FROM IF LIZWEREQUEEN:
If I were queen, I would require that the content of all media be labeled with a description of its content.
We don’t have to put up with outright lies and propaganda and we should not. We label our food content. We should start labeling our media content as well. If this were the case, Glenn Beck’s Content ID would read: ENTERTAINMENT 100%, Misinformation 95%, Propaganda for the Rich 100%.
