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I went to bed last night to hundreds of thousands chanting peacefully and woke up this morning to a miniature civil war.
I skipped my first class and would have skipped the others if I could have. I told the professor later that I skipped because there was a massacre happening and I couldn't deal with class right then.
I was exhausted from staying up all night every other night watching Al Jazeera, and I'm so stressed, I have so much work to keep up with, and I just couldn't deal with it all.
During classes I kept thinking about Tahrir Square and feeling like crying. Then during my French class we watched a movie in which one of the actors reminded me so much of someone I loved but haven't missed for a long time, so all those emotions came back up again, which was the last fucking thing I needed.
I started feeling better when I read tweets that protesters had held Tahrir Square. But then when I returned to my dorm, I started watching Richard Engle's excellent live reporting and watched a man get lynched on live TV.
Then my mom called, knowing I always get too caught up in events like this, and everything just started pouring out: the sadness and fear for those people, the guilt for my government's role in it, the anger at that government for not doing anything sooner. How much I hate that nobody here cares, how that apathy is what allows the US government carte blanche when it comes to foreign policy because it knows Americans don't know or care what it does abroad, and how that ultimately hurt my country as well, because the people who are suffering directly because of American policies rightfully resent us and some inevitably fall prey to radicalization, and that gets Americans killed, and diminishes our ability to do good in other countries, and makes resentful populations less likely to listen to our obviously hypocritical talk of democracy, which allows anti-democratic regimes to endure and ensures that people people continue to suffer.
And my mom said, you can't blame people for not knowing about dictators like that, I didn't know anything about Egypt because I've never researched it, and I said exactly, that's the point, you shouldn't have to research it. No individual is going to memorize every country's Wikipedia page. That's not what it's about. It's a cultural problem: we as a culture should just know this shit, and we sure as hell should know about shit our government plays a crucial role in, and we sure as hell should know about shit going down in a part of the world that is so critical to us. Knowledge about foreign affairs should be borne on the air the same way the latest Lady Gaga song is. But it's not because we as a culture have decided we don't care, and when that happens it's all over.
And then we see an angry mob somewhere far away burning American flags and we think, "Oh we're so innocent, what have we ever done to them?" and the level of our apathy is so great that we don't even try to find out the answer to that question, we just explain it away with a simplistic "oh they hate our freedom" and our government keeps on doing what it's doing and the world keeps spinning round.
And then I started crying for the first time since this all started. And I couldn't stop until Jon Stewart came on screen with his blue tie.
But now Jon's gone, and I'm hungry but I can't stand the thought of eating something, and I'm fucking exhausted but I'm afraid to sleep because of what I might miss, or even worse, what I might wake up to.
And oh by the way, today is Yemen's Day of Rage.
Fuck.
I want to be there. I want to bang on the doors of the White House. I want to make everyone in American sit down and listen to one of the Speak2Tweet messages from inside Egypt ("We're dying, Obama help us!" "Do not worry for us, we are willing to die in this square.") and then take every one of them and march through the streets and yell and demand that the American people be allowed to choose our foreign policy in this instance. Because if the American people voted whether or not to side with the protesters, I know what would win. I have to believe that I know which one Americans would pick.
I haven't felt like this since Iran in 2009, but back then there was nothing we could do. This time there is SO MUCH that we could do and NOTHING IS HAPPENING.
I don't want another Neda, shot with an American bullet. I don't. I don't.
I'm seeing so many tweets from Egyptians who started out so inspired by the American example of democracy, and are now so bitter and betrayed and angry at us. They will not forgive us, and I cannot blame them. The whole reason I've always wanted to go into diplomacy was to build bridges between America and other countries, because I love my country and I believe so strongly that other people should love it too, that we can atone for our wrongs and remake ourselves in the benevolent image that we cherish of ourselves, and that people in my own country can come to understand and cooperate with people of other countries and vice versa. That's what I want to make happen. That's what I've devoted myself to.
And seeing another nail hammered into the coffin of that dream, it feels like my heart is actually breaking.
It's almost 1 AM here but it's morning in Cairo, so how do I go to sleep? How do I?
I skipped my first class and would have skipped the others if I could have. I told the professor later that I skipped because there was a massacre happening and I couldn't deal with class right then.
I was exhausted from staying up all night every other night watching Al Jazeera, and I'm so stressed, I have so much work to keep up with, and I just couldn't deal with it all.
During classes I kept thinking about Tahrir Square and feeling like crying. Then during my French class we watched a movie in which one of the actors reminded me so much of someone I loved but haven't missed for a long time, so all those emotions came back up again, which was the last fucking thing I needed.
I started feeling better when I read tweets that protesters had held Tahrir Square. But then when I returned to my dorm, I started watching Richard Engle's excellent live reporting and watched a man get lynched on live TV.
Then my mom called, knowing I always get too caught up in events like this, and everything just started pouring out: the sadness and fear for those people, the guilt for my government's role in it, the anger at that government for not doing anything sooner. How much I hate that nobody here cares, how that apathy is what allows the US government carte blanche when it comes to foreign policy because it knows Americans don't know or care what it does abroad, and how that ultimately hurt my country as well, because the people who are suffering directly because of American policies rightfully resent us and some inevitably fall prey to radicalization, and that gets Americans killed, and diminishes our ability to do good in other countries, and makes resentful populations less likely to listen to our obviously hypocritical talk of democracy, which allows anti-democratic regimes to endure and ensures that people people continue to suffer.
And my mom said, you can't blame people for not knowing about dictators like that, I didn't know anything about Egypt because I've never researched it, and I said exactly, that's the point, you shouldn't have to research it. No individual is going to memorize every country's Wikipedia page. That's not what it's about. It's a cultural problem: we as a culture should just know this shit, and we sure as hell should know about shit our government plays a crucial role in, and we sure as hell should know about shit going down in a part of the world that is so critical to us. Knowledge about foreign affairs should be borne on the air the same way the latest Lady Gaga song is. But it's not because we as a culture have decided we don't care, and when that happens it's all over.
And then we see an angry mob somewhere far away burning American flags and we think, "Oh we're so innocent, what have we ever done to them?" and the level of our apathy is so great that we don't even try to find out the answer to that question, we just explain it away with a simplistic "oh they hate our freedom" and our government keeps on doing what it's doing and the world keeps spinning round.
And then I started crying for the first time since this all started. And I couldn't stop until Jon Stewart came on screen with his blue tie.
But now Jon's gone, and I'm hungry but I can't stand the thought of eating something, and I'm fucking exhausted but I'm afraid to sleep because of what I might miss, or even worse, what I might wake up to.
And oh by the way, today is Yemen's Day of Rage.
Fuck.
I want to be there. I want to bang on the doors of the White House. I want to make everyone in American sit down and listen to one of the Speak2Tweet messages from inside Egypt ("We're dying, Obama help us!" "Do not worry for us, we are willing to die in this square.") and then take every one of them and march through the streets and yell and demand that the American people be allowed to choose our foreign policy in this instance. Because if the American people voted whether or not to side with the protesters, I know what would win. I have to believe that I know which one Americans would pick.
I haven't felt like this since Iran in 2009, but back then there was nothing we could do. This time there is SO MUCH that we could do and NOTHING IS HAPPENING.
I don't want another Neda, shot with an American bullet. I don't. I don't.
I'm seeing so many tweets from Egyptians who started out so inspired by the American example of democracy, and are now so bitter and betrayed and angry at us. They will not forgive us, and I cannot blame them. The whole reason I've always wanted to go into diplomacy was to build bridges between America and other countries, because I love my country and I believe so strongly that other people should love it too, that we can atone for our wrongs and remake ourselves in the benevolent image that we cherish of ourselves, and that people in my own country can come to understand and cooperate with people of other countries and vice versa. That's what I want to make happen. That's what I've devoted myself to.
And seeing another nail hammered into the coffin of that dream, it feels like my heart is actually breaking.
It's almost 1 AM here but it's morning in Cairo, so how do I go to sleep? How do I?