Tag Archives: egypt

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Rednecks with explosives. There’s something about Independence Day that makes the rednecks in Ceciltucky especially susceptible to doing stupid shit. Maybe it’s just the long day of drinking cheap domestic beer combined with too many hours in the sun, but I have no idea what makes them think setting off mortar-style fireworks in a relatively dense subdivision makes any sense at all. Trust me, your half-acre yard isn’t nearly as big as you think it is. Then again they’re still better than the asshats up the hill who will undoubtedly commemorate the nation’s independence with “celebratory gunfire.”

2. Egypt. Surprise! The revolution that knocked off the long-time president-for-life of Egypt is in the process of imploding. One only needs to look to the history or revolutionary uprisings to find that they have a nasty tendency to devour their own young. Our own revolution of 1776 is perhaps an outlier because we broke ties with the colonial past, but opted to replace the royal government of George III with a republican government that operated with similar institutions and powers rather than attempting something more like a wholesale change of society. I’d go so far as to speculate that for the average citizen, living under as a citizen under President Washington instead of a subject under King George didn’t change their day to day lives all that much at the micro level. How’s that for sacrilege on Independence Day? Now our associates who are trying to completely remake Egypt? Yeah. That’s a whole different ball of wax. I’m only surprised that it took a year to really get sideways.

3. Buttons. I learned something new yesterday. Apparently the buttons, zippers, and other fasteners on men’s and women’s clothing are on opposite sides. I had spent the last 35 years blissfully unaware of this fact… and now that I know about it, it bothers me. It’s not the button location that bothers me so much as the idea that something so simple in daily life has eluded my notice for so long. It’s left me pondering what other little details on everyday life I’ve managed to avoid noticing.

In the streets…

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I was a kid when the Berlin Wall fell. I watched it, like the rest of the world, from on the living room television on the still new medium of 24-hour cable news. A few years later, on Christmas Day 1991, I watched the red banner of the Soviet Union lowered atop the Kremlin for the last time and the Evil Empire vote itself out of existence. It was supposed to be the “end of history” and a new era of peace and prosperity as the cold war between superpowers ended with a wimper and not a bang. And it seemed that way. For a while.

With the benefit of hindsight, we all know now that history was mostly just taking a breather. An operational pause if you will. Instead of stable, peaceful, and decidedly American, we discovered that without the weight of two competing superpowers, the world was a complex and and downright messy. The price of winning the Cold War was learning to live in a much less certain world full of unintended consequences.

I’m once again watching unimaginable events beamed from space into the comfort of my own living room. Twenty years have passed, the names and places have changed, but it’s the same old story. A change is gonna come. In Egypt. In Libya. Perhaps in Saudi Arabia and across the whole Middle East the world is proving, once again, that it’s still a complicated place. After all, we’re still America and it’s our long-held obligation to midwife democracy wherever in the world it might take root. We must, together, stand with these people who are rising up against decades of ruthless tyranny – not to dominate them – but to help them on the path to real and lasting democracy crafted to suit the particular needs of their country and their culture.

We have a moment, and just a moment, where history hangs in the balance. We’ve proved our mettle in two grinding wars to defeat a ruthless enemy on the battlefield. Now let us show our mettle as peacemakers and diplomats to take away the very chaos, instability, and hatred that sustain our enemies.