Not Matches. Dominoes.

Two years ago, watching the Green Revolution sweeping the streets of Tehran, I was transfixed on the symbols, the heart, and the tragic yearning of Iran’s young people, particularly it’s young women in the form of Neda Soltan, who died while taking to the streets against the repressive theocratic regime represented by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.. I became transfixed by revolution, especially one so poignant in its victims and as ruthless in its villains.

I’ve been asking friends who live in the region what kind of revolution do we have in the Middle East today? Is it cultural, like the one that overthrew the American-backed shah Reza Pahlavi establishing a theocracy and fundamental Muslim rule over Iran? Or is it economic, like the demonstrations in Greece? The answer seems to be both.

The revolution started in Tunisia where in recent elections Tunisians voted to unseat President Ben-Ali, a long-time political ally of the United States. It has spread to Yemen against its President Ali Abdullah Saleh and now, has ignited almost the entire nation of Egypt to rise up against its president Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia and Yemen have long standing strategic relations with the United States, and a stable Egypt as ally, personified by the Mubarak regime and the powerful Egyptian army, has been a mainstay in the region for the interests of the United States and its strongest ally Israel since the Camp David talks led by President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.

Yet, as empires fall, so do their proxy states. In recent history we saw the breakup of the Balkan states in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-bloc communism. Now as the American empire is reaching its economic limits, so are its proxy states and leaders facing change built up under the pressure cooker of regimes too tightly held for interests other than those of the people living there.

Matches ignite flames of destruction leaving ashes. Dominoes are stacked and they tumble and fall. This series of revolutions seems to be the tipping of dominoes. This is not anarchy. This was as inevitable as rain on a warm pressure front. We’ve all been here before, witnessing the fall of the former “Iron Curtain” nations under the former Soviet bloc starting in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. This is no different.

This tumble of revolutions from Tunisia to Cairo is exactly those dominoes – similar in shape but different in value, initiated by the slightest touch, fueled by outrage built up over decades of tension based on neglect, corruption, and oppression, finally given permission by the sheer audacity of its success in the most unexpected of places – Tunisia, where no one thought they would ever see Ben-Ali fall. He was as much a staple in Tunisian life as Mubarak is in Eqypt’s.

But times are changing. Stars, planets, and the right circumstances have given permission for the winds to blow the roof off the jails. Even as our worlds crumble, form and reshape themselves, new nations and empires are born. Like dominoes, countries fall, and get stacked back up again and again over the long span of centuries and millennia. Sometimes they rise in a new direction, a new order, and often on unsteady ground, but mostly, still there, holding on to the history of the world coming and going past our homes, our streets and our generations.

I have immense faith in the human capacity to survive regardless the shifting borders of a nation’s politics, borders, languages or religions. Watching these revolutions expand under the watchful eye of CNN’s newsfeed may fill us with fear and anxiety over what may be, yet knowing this is inevitable throughout the history of the world seems to help. In this phase of our lives here in the United States, we are learning more each day about the consequences in blood and treasury of holding on to imperial power for too long. These countries are not our home. They are theirs, straining under the weight of our interests, and are now at the breaking point.

As history has proven, no empire is eternal. Neither are the nations whose leaders depend on the existence of those empires. Not even the wonder of technology — which brought the 2009 Iranian Green revolution to the world and helped organize revolution on the streets of Cairo this last week — could outlast the mothers, children and grandparents marching the streets of Cairo today, kissing soldiers into putting their guns down, and knowing in their numbers they cannot fail even in the face of grave danger. Let us pray for all of them to land safely as we, thousands of miles away, behold history. Its throwing the dice, turning her page.

Yours and truly,

Fe Bongolan
San Francisco