Monday, February 14, 2011

Revolution

The resignation of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was truly revolutionary. Not the part where a dictator is overthrown; that happens from time to time. The world-shattering part is that the revolution was achieved with an almost total absence of gunfire. The weapon of choice was the internet. (www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/11/egyptian.president.) The revolution began, at least in part, on Facebook. If the unlikely election of Barack Obama in 2001 did not signal the end of business as usual (his war chest was almost completely funded by small contributors through the internet) then certainly this change of government does. The Egyptian people’s overthrow of Mubarak is a gigantic boulder thrown into a pond with ripples of influence that are so far unimagined, both positive and negative. This form of public oversight sounds radically like a government “of the people, by the people.”


By Sam DelPresto

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