Walk like an Egyptian

My Egyptian Brothers and Sisters

Congratulations my fellow freedom fighters

You stood alone and unarmed with only your dreams for a democratic future to protect you.  Led by ideas and hope not despots or generals or business tycoons, or bankers or dangerous men and women armed with plastic explosive and infrared glasses, dropped from gunships in the dark of night.

I can see, Thomas Jefferson and the proud General Washington looking on in admiration even Thomas Paine, looked up from his pamphleteering to smile for a moment before he went back to his work of reminding men and women that they must be free of despots.

You said, no to the security state, you turned away in horror, from the whips, and iron bars and electrodes of those secretive butchers down below in the dark forcing screams from the innocent. You didn't need martial law, you didn't need special security rules and terrorist bombs.

You just said no, and no further. You were braver than the enforcers, you were braver, than the secret men who pulled the despots' strings.

We don't need such bravery in these fair lands, we have the pATRIOT aCT. We don't need the sinew to face down a charging band of secret service cavalry on horses and camels, we take our shoes off at the airports. We don't need the kind of brave hearts that can hold a town square like Tahrir, we have universal surveillance on our streets and the internet. 

We don't need no democracy down home, we have lobbyists and purchased legislators, and bankers here in the land of the free. We're too busy inserting enforcing democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and sending in via cruise missiles into Pakistan. 

We don't need the kind of inconvenience of camping out in Tahrir Square. We have Homeland Security and a Constitutional Scholar to keep us safe from Habeas Corpus. But Good Luck Egyptians... We don't need your kind of new fresh citizen activists. We have pre-owned political parties to choose the faces who are purported to be in-charge on TEE VEE.