by Fe Bongolan
Today, my heart is full with the thoughts and feelings of the dreamers of the world. Voices from the cradle of Western civilization have not only spoken, but have won. I am still shaking away my disbelief — an uprising of the people has overturned a dictator who ruled for 30 years. This is called revolution.
For the last thirty years or more, the conventional wisdom is that the ‘little people’ do not topple dictatorships. We are led to believe that we don’t let our anger at the system bleed out into the streets in mass revolt, like we did as kids in the 1960s, or even like the mass cultural revolts leading to the Islamic Revolution in Iran that overthrew the American-backed Shah of Iran in the 1970s.
Egypt did not conduct your normal 20th century revolution against an empire’s dominion. Its revolution was neither singularly cultural or economic. It was both. Egypt birthed a 21st century revolution over just distribution of resources through the power of the individual. Their revolution involved all denominations, generations, the labor movement and the military to carry it off. Beyond the use of Twitter and Facebook, it stood on uno campo santo — a holy ground — conducting their revolution through the sacred power of moral courage.
We remember this. Gandhi’s practice of non-violent revolution through soul force was taken up by Reverend Martin Luther King over forty years ago, the last time a movement of that moral foundation happened in America. Young men and women of all denominations and races marched through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama to openly defy America’s racism. They stood against the National Guard, dogs and fire hoses. They would not be intimidated when klansmen bombed churches. They sat in the front seats of segregated buses, and were the first black students to integrate formerly all-white schools. They staged sit-ins on college campus to protest the Vietnam War. They burned draft cards and bras.