Egypt Uprising- The Death of the Old Regime: Winning the Future and Capturing the Sputnik Moment
The American Revolution that I referred to extensively in the last two articles on this series on Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address where he talked about Winning The Future and Capturing the Sputnik Moment deserves our attention today not only for its own sake but also what it represented on in the whole earth. Keep in mind that the American Revolution that happened in 1776 was the first of a long series of revolutions that were to mark the year 1776 onwards – a series that is not over yet as we see it continuing in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.
Revolution is like a snowball on a slope. It is not easy to get it going. But once it is on its way it is hard to stop it from rolling and growing until it becomes an avalanche. At this moment people of varying opinions are wondering how these revolutions we see or we are experiencing in the Arab world will turn out. That is the nature of revolutions.
REPEAT FOR EMPHASIS: The American Revolution and the establishment of the United States marked the beginning of a new age for the rest of the world and the world is still in progress shaping up to this new age. Egypt Tunisia and the other Arab world are shaping up to this new age set up by America.
American history had produced a kind of philosophy in the world – it marked an enormous point in the entire history of the human race.
One of the most revered public documents of America is the dollar bill. The dollar bill bears on its reverse the date 1776 and the inscription Novus Ordo Seclorum (New World Order) which means that in that fateful year, 1776 not only was that a new nation was born but a new order of human society free from the sins and follies of Europe was born. Ironically it is the same American dollar bill that the currencies of the world are weighted with.
This is what Thomas Paine has to say about the new American Spirit after the American Revolution:
“What were formerly called Revolutions, were little more than a change of persons, or an alteration of local circumstances. They rose and fell like things, of course, and had nothing in their existence or their fate that could influence beyond the spot that produced them. But what we now see in the world, from the Revolutions of America and France, are a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity.” (Paine, 1984 ed., p. 144)
In his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” Of Americans, he vows, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak with our own minds.”
What we see in Egypt is the American Spirit of revolution. What we see in Egypt is that in every aspect of life new ideas and new values are taking over. Like in the American Revolution, the people who lit the fuse in Egypt are the educated, the better off BUT frustrated. The people who lit the fuse in Egypt are the better educated youth but are frustrated because of unemployment and inability to have a say in the way they are governed just like America. They exploded through facebook, twitter, blogs, phone texting, email etc.
