Pray

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.

What has happened to us? In America, any signs of revolt these days have been mass-produced and meaningless — such as the billionaire Koch Brothers’ funding of the Tea Party Movement to protest health care reform in 2009. Even the 2010 parody pre-midterm “Rally to Restore Sanity” produced by the Comedy Central network offered an appropriate, corporate brand — a satire to evoke the recognition of the reality of our present day corporate-owned politics. We revolt so that the very rich can collect more earnings.

The irony of those two events happening in our culture and history is not lost — we have the framework of corporate spectacle to validate democratic proceedings, and we manufacture participation to fight the power that wants to hold corporations back. Somewhere in America tonight, there is an (R) by the small print of protest signs. We should have known something like that was coming when 60s radical Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker.

The practice of democracy in the United States has been more and more sanctioned by corporate framing, riddled with news-opinion and frosted over with punditry that formulates your thoughts before you think them. These venues replace our actual feelings, bubbling them up into bite-sized tweets with all the depth and complexity of a recipe for lemon bars. We are displaced from a sense of outrage because our outrage is felt FOR us — we therefore don’t have to feel it. The corporate person does this for us, and it is sanctioned by a ruling of the Supreme Court.

If we truly allowed ourselves to feel and express the rage built up over years from a system bilking us of rights, from the poisoning of our food, water and planet, from the moral and social bankruptcy of a neglected education system that replaces our children’s curiosity and imagination with fear and conformity, from enslavement of the working class by diminishing wages and the poor from the prison industrial complex — all so that the corporations of America can still reap their fortunes — we would be screaming and unable to stop.

Actually, that’s almost exactly what happened to the people of Egypt. But they did something about it.

A new story in Egypt is being told as we watch. This story is bigger than just the overthrow of government. It is a moment in history that we have been waiting for a long time, some of us with hope, though most of the time with fear. As we start doffing off the robes of empire with its embers dying slowly, we now have to adjust to the world changing as much as the world has had to adjust to us dominating. This adjustment is not going to be easy.

This movement is not ours to judge, evaluate, ponder or pundit. It is theirs to own, and ours to learn from. We actually asked for this, but never thought it would happen. Not this way. For over sixty years, we thought we could spread democratic values with the force of our military might and our wealth to do with, and take from, any country we wanted. But those days are over. We are now compromised with old allegiances and vested interests hog tied because new kids on the block are showing the aging western face of democracy what a real democratic movement looks like.

Tonight I look to the east and begin a prayer for Egypt. A prayer for continuing the joy earned from a revolution made successful by passion, purpose and community. I pray for the people to patiently wade through the long, hard grind it will take to build a new nation, and pray that this fragile seed of a new government holds together against all the overwhelming odds still stacked against it: history, competing ideologies and religions, a military we don’t know to trust and corporate interests that have long laid the planet to waste — waiting for the right opportunity to do damage. I pray not to any god of ours or theirs. I pray to them and to each of us. I pray that they are praying for us too. Praying for us to one day arise, take the walk and join them at the square.

Yours  & truly,

Fe Bongolan
San Francisco