by: Thomas L Friedman
Watching President Hosni Mubarak addressing his nation on Thursday night, explaining why he would not be drummed out of office by foreigners, I felt embarrassed for him and worried for Egypt. This man is staggeringly out of touch with what is happening inside his country. This is Rip Van Winkle meets Facebook.
The fact that the several hundred thousand Egyptians in Tahrir Square reacted to Mr 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. Mr Mubarak, in one speech, shifted this Egyptian democracy drama from mildly hopeful, even thrilling, to dangerous.
All day here, there was a drumbeat of leaks that the fix was in: Mr Mubarak was leaving, the army leadership was meeting and Vice-President Omar Suleiman would oversee the constitutional reform process.
The fact that this did not turn out to be the case suggests there is some kind of a split in the leadership of the Egyptian army, between the anti-Mubarak factions leaking his departure and the pro-Mubarak factions helping him to stay.
The words of Mr Mubarak and Mr Suleiman directed to the democracy demonstrators could not have been more insulting: "Trust us. We'll take over the reform agenda now. You all can go back home, get back to work and stop letting those foreign satellite TV networks - i.e., Al Jazeera - get you so riled up. Also, do not let that Obama guy dictate to us proud Egyptians what to do."
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 Mr 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 on Thursday said: "Tahrir - the only free place in Egypt."
So I went up to one of these young people on garbage duty - Mr Karim Turki, 23, who worked in a skin-care shop - and asked him: "Why did you volunteer for this?" He could not 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, Mr 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 on 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 Mr 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 of presidency council, made up of respected figures to oversee the transition to democracy, Mr 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 non-violent democracy movement and send it into a rage.
The new York times
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