With Egypt in Mind

What a shame it is that revolutions can't be viewed as being just rumpled, impromptu, improvised, unscheduled elections.   Elections, moreover, that are held with a minimum of fuss and muss, and especially without any beatings, shootings, imprisonments, and all the other countless ways that humans have cooked up to mistreat each other.

But the trouble is that once people are in power, they become so fond of the many perks that that situation offers that they start looking on themselves as being the personal owners of that power, and they convince themselves and their underlings that they are justified in holding those offices not just for a long while but for the rest of their lives.   And so they wheel out the guns and clubs and resist with might and main all efforts to remove them from those positions before they're ready, regardless of any common decency.

Right now, as we speak, this is a truly amazing time to see and -- if you are in the right place, or the wrong one, depending on your view of things -- to experience this situation and the attempts of revolutions to change it, in all that process's varied ways, thanks to the Arab world and thereabouts, because in that region it is happening in so many different countries, and all at the same moment!  That can't be repeated too often.  All at the same hour.    This has to be the first time in human history that this has ever happened.

Let's call the roll, off the top of my head, as best as I can remember, as I reckon.   First Tunisia (with that ousted leader, Ben Ali, now having had a bad heart attack, no doubt from his having had to make an unscheduled removal to the unsavory deserts of Saudi Arabia), and next Egypt, with a revolution that was a thing of beauty and a classic, as revolutions go, and now, having been so inspired, protestors are on the march in Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria, and Libya, while stirrings are being made in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Italy, and other places -- all of these in countries with rulers who have been running things for longer than it should take for any sensible person to realize that there are others in the country who should be given their turn at the job.

But then I've never seen anything wrong with politics being run on a quota system, since it is supposed to be taken part in by all the people and not just a favored few or one or two.


Too bad I can't include the American state of Wisconsin in that,  but anyway, there, surely with Egypt on their minds, people are on the march, too, against the attempt of incoming woodenheads to cut the teachers right off at the knees, by destroying their unions.   It is the teachers, after all, who are the keystones of the American Arch, not the police, as so many seem to believe.   People rarely seem to realize that they are usually in far more danger from the society's ignorance than they are from ordinary criminals -- and lawmakers.