The Egyptian revolution

I think I'm due to post something intelligent. Though to be completely honest, I really don't feel it. I think this will be completely idiotic and inarticulate, but you know, to hell with diction.

I really don't have that much to say because I'm not that well informed on the subject. But what I do know is that if this revolution in Egypt is anything like what I heard my parents describing the Romanian revolution to be like, then a lot of people are going to regret it in a couple of years. If they were starving now, they will starve even more in the future. If poverty and injustice were bad now, they will be even worse some time down the line. Sure, they'll be able to criticize the president and they'll have stand up comedians building sketches around the blunders of politicians. But that'll be all they'll have. In Romanian we have a saying "sa faci haz de necaz" which means to laugh at your misfortunes.

Of course, it all depends on who will take charge of the country right now. Will the military council relinquish power like it's supposed to or will it keep an iron grip on the land and start yet another dictatorship? If they do get a new president, who will it be and what will he do for the country (I'm using "he" because even if we're talking about a revolution, this is still an Arabic country and I highly doubt that their first new president in 30 years will be a woman)? In Romania, after the revolution, the people who took over were Ceausescu's old lackeys who seized their chance to overthrow their old master so that they could take their turn to gnaw at the bone. So it was basically the same system, the same mentality (for the leaders as for the population), slightly enriched with the concept of "freedom of speech", but also filled with corruption and unemployment. So, sure, the Egyptians have a shot at living a better life. But there are also chances that they were better off with Mubarak. I'm not saying that all the nations of the world should be subservient and just live with their lot and with what life gave them without fighting for a better future. All I'm saying is that revolutions don't always have a happy ending even if they manage to get rid of the old hag who was in charge. But at that point it's only the beginning. Anything can happen now and there are more ways in which it could go bad than ways in which it could go well.

In anthropology there is a concept that is called "anomie" and it represents a lack of social norms or a mismatch between an individual's personal beliefs and those of his native culture. It is used to describe why people might commit suicide in societies that are too restrictive or too rule oriented. However, the reason why I'm talking about it in this case is because, while I was typing, I had an image pop into my head. When I first heard about anomie, I was taking an anthropology class in CEGEP and we were watching a video about rites of passage for young warriors in amazonian tribes. And they were explaining that, in this tribe, young boys were taken into the forest where they would have to pass a series of tests and trials through which they would grow and they would come back to the village as men. However, these trials would challenge them on a physical as well as a psychological level and during that time they were in a sort of no-man's-land. Neither boys nor men, during this transitional state, they would come to see their world and their culture through the eyes of an outsider. This was the most dangerous stage in their development because at that point they had the choice to either accept the cultural norms of their people and live as accomplished men in their tribe, or they could decide to reject them and this would bring internal and external conflict (of course, ideally, the second scenario should not happen and earlier socialization should be enough to prevent it). This transitional state is what they call "anomie" and this is where Egypt is right now. It's in between regimes. Anything can happen.

And that's as far as my reflection goes...