Bob Dylan and John Lennon: Their music rings true in the Middle East

I’m not a a war correspondent, a newscaster, or a politician. I’m a human being who, like millions of others around the world, has been watching the fight for democracy unfold in Egypt.

I don’t want to be one of those people who digests monumental happenings in soundbites and then quickly moves on, not interested in others’ hardship and pain unless it directly affects me.

Ultimately everything has an effect on all of us who share the planet. This post is my way of acknowledging those who died and those who were willing to die for the things we Americans take for granted.

Back in 1963, Bob Dylan recorded the song, “The Times They Are A-Changing.” Here is one of the stanzas:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside that is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin

These lyrics are as relevant and meaningful today as they were forty years ago. In some places in the world, times are unfortunately a-changing out of necessity, because things like greed and the need some people have to dominate and control others, remains the same.

John Lennon’s songs “Power to the People” and “Revolution 1,” written back in the seventies, could have been the Egyptian anthem during the 18 tense, uncertain, death-defying days from January 25 – February 11, 2011, when the world witnessed the largest, popular uprising in modern history in the Arab world.

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I couldn’t tear myself away from the TV as I watched hundreds of thousands of people gather in Tahrir Square, also known as Liberation Square. They came in droves—rich and poor, young and old, religious and nonsecular, those who are tech savvy alongside uneducated peasants—Egyptians  united beyond their differences by the heritage they share.

They pitched tents, set up make-shift camps, and went without the simple necessities of bathrooms, electricity, or running water in order to stand up against police brutality, unemployment, soaring food costs, and a corrupt government during the 30-year dictatorial rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

Like a cyber-thriller, this revolution’s roots began in the spring of 2010 when a 30-year-old, bespectacled father of two, named Wael Ghonim volunteered to run the Facebook fan page of Mohamed El Baradei, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner, who had emerged as President Mubarak’s key opponent.

Ghonim became an international figure and galvanized pro-democracy demonstrations in Egypt after his emotional interview following 11 days of secret incarceration by Egyptian police.

As a Google executive, Ghonim knew the power of the Internet. He believed Facebook could be the ideal revolutionary tool in his country, which has been under a martial law since Mubarak became president in 1981.

Ghonim became the organizing nucleus of the uprising in June 2010, after a young businessman from Alexandria, Egypt, named Khaled Said, posted a video on the Web that showed police pilfering pot from a drug bust. The local police found Said at an Internet café, dragged him outside, and beat him to death in broad daylight. Photos of his battered corpse went viral.

That was when Ghonim anonymously started a new Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said,” that posted a constant stream of photos, videos, and news and quickly became a powerful campaign against police brutality in Egypt.

The times they are a-changin.

In order to protect himself and honor Khaled Said, Ghonim chose the moniker “El Shaheed,” or “The Martyr,” which roused the people and helped create an army of protestors. Only a select few people knew El Shaheed’s true identity.

When the people took to the streets in Tunisia on January 14 and ousted that country’s longtime dictator, Ghonim or rather “El Shaheed, The Martyr,” announced Egypt’s own revolution and invited 350,000-plus Facebook fans turned out on January 25.

The FB page “We Are All Khaled Said” became a bullhorn to rally people to take action. As Ghonim implored them to spread the word to others on the ground, hundreds of thousands of people began to take part in street demonstrations, marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, and labor strikes. Crowds marched on the Presidential Palace and barricaded the State Television that wasn’t reporting the truth.

In a country where demonstrations usually only consist of a couple of hundred people who are swiftly crushed by police, the scale of this protest was beyond anyone’s expectations.

The times they are a-changin.

On January 27, 2011, Wael Ghonim’s family reported him missing. It soon became clear he was being detained by the secret police. When people found out Ghonim was El Shaheed, he was hailed a hero, a symbol of the revolution, and people started a “We are all Wael Ghonim” Facebook page.

For eleven days, the Google executive sat in a jail cell, blindfolded and unaware of what was happening in the streets. He didn’t know if the Egyptian military had mowed down the people like the Iranian army did to its citizens who were part of the Green Revolution, when they disputed the election victory of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

Leaders who are controlled by greed, status and power, aren’t easily persuaded to give those things up.

After a brutal round of violent clashes between protesters and pro-government loyalists took place on January 28-29 in Cairo, Alexandria, and elsewhere in Egypt, more than 100 deaths were reported, and 750 policemen and 1,500 protesters were reported injured.

On February 5, it was confirmed that Wael Ghonim was alive. The next day Amnesty International demanded the Egyptian authorities release him, which he was on February 7, 2011.

That same day he appeared on Egyptian TV and praised the protesters and mourned the dead. After the host read the names and showed the pictures of those who gave their life for freedom, Wael Ghonim became so overwhelmed with grief he sobbed uncontrollably and had to walk off camera. He had no idea he would become a worldwide celebrity.

On February 9, he addressed the crowds in Tahrir Square telling protesters, “This is not the time for individuals, or parties, or movements. It’s a time for all of us to say just one thing—Egypt above all.

But despite the protests, Mubarak refused to step down. He alternated between inducements and threats. With his back pushed against the wall, he offered meager reforms, but it was too little too late. The people wanted his resignation.

By February 10, the death toll was conservatively 300, and possibly double or triple that. I went to bed worried that the Egyptian people would be beaten into submission.

Fouad Ajami, a professor and Director of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, wrote about Mubarak: “He had grown remote and imperious. And in Liberation Square, the aged ruler saw a whole new country emerge before his startled eyes.”

Miraculously, the next morning when I turned on the TV, I learned Egypt’s president had finally conceded and was turning power over to the military, who had turned the guns on their tanks away from the people. I cried as I saw hundreds of thousands of jubilant protesters in Tahrir Square and headlines that read, “Egypt is free.”

Ajami said, “No turbaned ayatollah stepped forth to summon the crowd. This was not Iran in 1979. A young Google executive, Wael Ghonim, energized this protest when it might have lost heart, when it could have succumbed to the belief that this regime and its leaders were a big, immovable object. Mr. Ghonim is a man of the modern world. He was not driven by piety. The condition of his country—the abject poverty, the crony economy of plunder and corruption, the cruelties at the hands of police—gave this young man and other Egyptians like him their historical warrant.”

It only took eighteen days to topple the man who had been a dictator for 30 years. But freedom came at a price, not only in deaths, but in that currency that greed most values. When Mubarak left office he took somewhere between $40 and $70 billion with him. It seems to me that only someone who has made a pact with the devil could take such a sum while men, women, and children live in squalor without the basic necessities.

The thirst for democracy is contagious. As I write this, a full scale revolt has been going on in Libya, as the people there try to oust Muammar al-Gaddafi after 41 years. Reports say so far 1,000 people have been killed. A Libyan woman talking on the phone to Anderson Cooper said people were afraid to come out of there houses for fear of being killed. She didn’t know how much longer they could hold on, and she asked the United States, the World, someone, to help them, to take action against their maniacal leader. My heart goes out to them.

People in countries around the world are fighting for the freedom that Americans take for granted. I wondered what it would take for us to take to the streets.

I had no idea that would happen only days after the uprising in Egypt when 35,000 teachers, students, and other pro-union protesters descended on the State Capitol Building  in Wisconsin defending their most cherished ideals against the newly elected Tea Party Governor who wanted to strip them of their right to collectively bargain and negotiate their contract.

Americans will find that we are not immune to civil unrest. As the middle class disappears and the gap between the rich and poor widens, when there is a food shortage in a country that has been used to All-You-Can-Eat Buffets, when we pay the true price of gas that includes the cost of two wars, when we can’t afford health care, we may have more empathy for the people in Egypt, Iran, Yemen, Tunisia,  and Libya.

We have our own Mubarak in the form of people like Bernie Madoff and all those corporate executives who give themselves outrageous salaries, bonuses, and Golden Parachute compensation plans while millions of people are losing their homes.

Is it too much to imagine a world that is not ruled by greed; a world where people are willing to do with a little less so that others might have a little more.

Even after all these years, John Lennon’s words still ring true here in the U.S., in the Middle East, and everywhere.

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace