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| Illustration by Amin |
Being a child of the eighties, I always wanted to have experienced the turbulent sixties. Even since I was a young boy, I was looking up to all those pictures of people striding for freedom, turning Europe and America upside down: the Prague Spring, American civil rights movement, the protest against the Vietnam war, the student barricades in Paris, ...
In my eyes, those were "romantic revolutionary" times and I do my best to keep the good values of all those movements high: Peace, Love, Freedom and Equality. It might sound cheezy, but it is a good and positive mindset.
Would I ever dare to step up for what I believe in? Would I ever experience a revolution? Or even participate?
The strange thing about "revolutions" is that you can't name an event as such until it is passed. Of course you can speculate or try to predict ("this is a revolutionary change!"), but you can only determine afterwards if it really was a landmark in history or not.
So I would love to activily experience (fully aware) such a milestone in history, and hopefully for the good. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the borders of the old Soviet Union, yes, I have lived through it, but I was still too young to understand its importance.
But now, the time has come! I remember the speech of, the now president, Barack Obama in December 2007. While I was waiting for my flight in Kotoka Airport, Ghana, everybody was intensely watching the television, almost like spell-bound. It was a CNN-broadcast of his complete speech and you could just feel the high expectations of all the viewers in the departure hall at that moment.
The current difficult government formation in Belgium is also worth mentioning, but the most impressive movement at this moment, is that of the uprisings in the Middle East. It seems that regimes, established for long time, are now falling down Like dominoes because of the rising up of their civilians, protesting against the high food prices, the corruption or the autocracy.
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| Source unknown |
Look at Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak has been chased out of office by his people. The army has now taken over control, but nobody knows in which direction it will all go from now on. Like one of the former students said about the Prague Spring: "We all wanted freedom, of that we were certain, but how to define that freedom, of that we all had different opinions".
It is a very interesting subject: revolt. Everyboy will agree that they are disagreeing with the current state of affairs, but everybody will disagree on how it should be. "We all wanted change, but what kind of change, that we still had to decide".
This is a major landmark in middle-eastern politics. Everybody is now waiting. curious to know how it will go from now on. The dictator has been thrown over, but what from now on?
Although I am not actively involved, I am finally experiencing revolutionary times.
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