This is something I’ve never seen in my lifetime. Maybe it’s the coverage. Maybe the amount of internet availability. Maybe just the pace of events.
But watching this now, watching Egypt fight for a new government and seeing how so many other things have been affected. Knowing that these events are historic not just in themselves but because of the technology that assists them…it’s amazing to me.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a time before cable. When news was something that was on a couple times a day. When wars were fought and revolutions waged in places far away that I couldn’t access easily.
It’s easy to let this go into a background processing, because we have so much media. So much white noise. So many tweets and blogs and “static” now.
This is a real time human struggle for freedom. A revolution. A fundamental shift in an entire region of the world.
I have to remind myself that this is real. And that people are dying right this moment. It’s not a movie. It’s not a Michael Bay production. It’s not a Bruckheimer TV show. It’s real.
And that’s a hard thing to know as I sit here watching. But I’ll keep reminding myself. Because forgetting — letting it become just another “thing” in the news and on the screen — that would be harder to live with.
My thoughts and prayers and love to all who fight, to those who watch and worry and to the world in general.
We’re history in the making. All of us. Right now.
Please remember that this is PRECISELY what occurred in Iran and led to the formation of it’s theocratic regime. Fighting for freedom is certainly noble, but more often than not that fight gets hijacked by forces which only seek to subjugate the very people fighting. They wish for freedom, but what they will likely find is misery far wore than that from whence they came- and that isn’t cynicism, but rather a rational view of the history of political revolution.
It’s nice that you can write so much of what I feel. I’ve watched the news all my life. read news magazines and the newspaper. Cable news has become an addition and I have to walk away sometimes just to escape the depression it can bring. My things is I want to yell at all the people who don’t educate themselves and just blindly go on as if things don’t matter in the world. Judi Duck
And as Americans supporting the values of Democracy we need to sit back and let the people determine their future. We are witnessing for North Africa and the MidEast what could quite possibly be their 1989.
And yet what most people don’t realize is that as Americans, we have to acknowledge the fact that this may not work out in OUR best interests, even if it does work out in THEIR best interests.