An American Perspective: Trusting the Arab Youth

By Lawrence Brown

In 1984, Orwell had one of his characters explain that usually
revolutionaries enlist the energy of the masses to get the top elites and
those immediately below them to switch places. Then the rhetoric fades…
order is reestablished, and once again, the light fades from people’s eyes.

It’s certainly too early to know what will come from Egypt and
Tunisia, but early reports from Cairo suggest that women, who played such a
courageous role in the uprising (as women did in Iran) are being pushed out
of the discussion as new government is being formed. The range of what
seems possible is already being narrowed.

Elsewhere, the Iranian model is being imitated. A wave of
repression is sweeping the Muslim world. If the army will refuse to fire
upon the people, revolutions have a chance of success. Otherwise, brutality
works. Protesters are driven into their homes, then hunted down to be
arrested… tortured… disappeared. Kaddafi is doing it in Libya; Assad in
Syria follows his father in doing it. The Saudis do it.

It’s not clear how Yemen will go, or whether if the government
falls, what will replace it. Yemen could join Afghanistan and the Sudan
into lawlessness – or Islamic theocracy.

It’s worthwhile to remember who the revolutionaries are. There
are American analysts who concentrate on radical Islamists, wanting to block
their every turn. Certainly, the radicals have clear agendas and tight
organizational discipline. But the majority of protesters are young. In
our preoccupation with Islamists, we risk ignoring the wave of the future.
If we are too cynical to believe that their freedom is attainable, we have
nothing to say to 50-70% of the Arab world – who are under thirty.

May I suggest that what most people in the world want from their
government is to be left alone. It is inconceivable that government could
actually be a partner in their pursuit of happiness. All they’re asking is
that they be relieved of the daily corruption and repression that besets and
bleeds them at every turn.

So urgent is our thirst for oil that we’ve gotten into bed with
the very elites Arab youth is seeking to escape from. These elites have
promised to deliver us from the Islamists we both fear, and in return we’ll
remain deaf and blind to the suffering of ordinary people.

Young Arab revolutionaries may find it hard to design a
government that will truly leave them alone; besides they want more than
that. But what will that be?

Maybe it could be something new. These kids are plugged in:
they have cell phones, internet… they organize on Facebook and with Tweets.
They are also Muslim. Perhaps they are looking for something that is
neither the market-driven industrialism of the West nor a suffocating
tyranny of religiosity. East and West… we each proceed as if we alone were
on the side of angels whereas in fact, both systems are deeply flawed and
incomplete. If there is to be a new synthesis of capital and conscience,
perhaps it will begin in Egypt.

I am convinced the future will not be brought to us by the old,
but by the young. It will not be brought to us by the comfortable, but by
the oppressed, for whom the need for change is apparent. If the future is
built on revenge, then the grudges of the old will enslave their children,
but if the future is to be based on hope, then it must be based on
forgiveness and love.

We cannot expect our leaders to bring in the changes, for they
already benefit from things as they are. Even revolutionary organizations
have their elites with their ambitions. I would not have given my life to
teaching if I did not trust the young. Against all odds, they must be
given the space to dream deeply and then shape the world anew according to
their heart’s desire. I am not naïve; I know what goes on – and so do you.
But without hope, change for the better will not come in Egypt, nor
anywhere. Any policy that does not support this hope will fail.


Lawrence Brown has been a teacher for 34 years teaching geography and
ancient history. As a newspaper columnist, he has published over 850 columns. One of the founders of an interfaith movement on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the United States, he has been a speaker at two Parliaments of the World’s Religions, Cape Town South Africa in 1999 and Barcelona, Spain in 2004.