No longer! No longer! No longer! FREEDOM NOW!

By Khmer Democrat, Phnom Penh
Power to the Cambodian People

No longer fear! No longer humiliation! No longer renting! We want freedom now! Excerpts of article, with my emphasis:

Out of Touch, Out of Time
Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times, February 10, 2011

[…] This man [Mubarak] is staggeringly out of touch with what is happening inside his country. The fact that the several hundred thousand Egyptians in Tahrir Square reacted to Mubarak’s speech by waving their shoes — they surely would have thrown them at him if he had been in range — and shouting “go away, go away,” pretty much sums up the reaction.

This narrative is totally out of touch with the reality of this democracy uprising in Tahrir Square, which is all about the self-empowerment of a long-repressed people no longer willing to be afraid, no longer willing to be deprived of their freedom, and no longer willing to be humiliated by their own leaders, who told them for 30 years that they were not ready for democracy. Indeed, the Egyptian democracy movement is everything that Hosni Mubarak says it is not: homegrown, indefatigable and authentically Egyptian. Future historians will write about the large historical forces that created this movement, but it is the small stories you encounter in Tahrir Square that show why it is unstoppable.

I spent part of the morning in the square watching and photographing a group of young Egyptian students wearing plastic gloves taking garbage in both hands and neatly scooping it into black plastic bags to keep the area clean. This touched me in particular because more than once in this column I have quoted the aphorism that “in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car.” I used it to make the point that no one has ever washed a rented country either — and for the last century Arabs have just been renting their countries from kings, dictators and colonial powers. So, they had no desire to wash them.

Well, Egyptians have stopped renting, at least in Tahrir Square, where a sign hung Thursday said: “Tahrir — the only free place in Egypt.” So I went up to one of these young kids on garbage duty — Karim Turki, 23, who worked in a skin-care shop — and asked him: “Why did you volunteer for this?” He couldn’t get the words out in broken English fast enough: “This is my earth. This is my country. This is my home. I will clean all Egypt when Mubarak will go out.” Ownership is a beautiful thing.

As I was leaving the garbage pile, I ran into three rather prosperous-looking men who wanted to talk. One of them, Ahmed Awn, 31, explained that he was financially comfortable and even stood to lose if the turmoil here continued, but he wanted to join in for reasons so much more important than money. Before this uprising, he said, “I was not proud to tell people I was an Egyptian. Today, with what’s been done here” in Tahrir Square, “I can proudly say again I am an Egyptian.”

Humiliation is the single most powerful human emotion, and overcoming it is the second most powerful human emotion. That is such a big part of what is playing out here.

Finally, crossing the Nile bridge away from the square, I was stopped by a well-dressed Egyptian man — a Times reader — who worked in Saudi Arabia. He was with his wife and two young sons. He told me that he came to Cairo Thursday to take his two sons to see, hear, feel and touch Tahrir Square. “I want it seared in their memory,” he told me. It seemed to be his way of ensuring that this autocracy never returns. These are the people whom Mubarak is accusing of being stirred up entirely by foreigners. In truth, the Tahrir movement is one of the most authentic, most human, quests for dignity and freedom that I have ever seen.

But rather than bowing to that, retiring gracefully and turning over the presidency either to the army or some kind presidency council made up of respected figures to oversee the transition to democracy, Mubarak seems determined to hang on in a way that, at best, will slow down Egypt’s evolution to democracy and, at worst, take a grass-roots, broad-based Egyptian nonviolent democracy movement and send it into a rage.