A couple of action-packed weeks ago, I sat, enthralled, following every power-to-the- people moment of the protesting that eventually led to the stepping down of now former Egyptian President Mubarak. I would toggle between political commentaries, personal accounts, uninformative White House press releases and Al Jazeera’s live feed and comment aloud to my husband, or whoever else was in the mood for one of my soapbox rants.
I had never really devoted any thought to international politics, really, ever in my life. I just supposed I was a small working class gal living in a small working class town with my small, cozy working class family. Surely, I had my own life about which to worry. Plus, it seemed rather burdensome to keep straight in my head all the names of all the countries and all their respective leaders and geographical locations in the midst of formulating my own grocery lists other such critical factoids that kept my family fed and healthy and happy. Then, the economy tanked and it was like I woke up and discovered that neither my own little world, or the great big global society was ever or will ever be flat. It’s round and we are connected!
For the longest time, I lived in a happy, little isolationist world where as long as I focused on my little problems and ignored the big problems of elsewhere, they could not possibly affect me. Why worry about there when we have so many problems here? And then, like a flash of lighting, the protests in Egypt happened by way of an impressive use of the modern technology of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. The protests were organized and unceasing, massive and determined. For what were they fighting?
I had grown rather accustomed to religious battles in the Middle East and surrounding regions, which was actually probably the source of my apathy, but this unrest was different. It was the middle class, the middle class that had actually become poor because of the government and their lack of empathy for the plight of the proletariat- for their own constituents. This fight, however, was against an elected “President” that had been in office for thirty odd years. It was against a government that had, for thirty years, made little progress in anything economically, but making the poor poorer and the small percentage of the wealthy, wealthier.
Of course we, in the United States, elect our President every four years. It’s done through a democratic republic process where we cast a confidential ballot in order to choose the person best qualified for the job. At least, that’s how it is on paper. Can someone working in a blue collar job, making $30K/ year and supporting a family of four run for President? Absolutely. Anyone, barring felonies and the like, can run for office (well, the President has to be at least 35 years old.) The Kevin Kline movie, Dave is categorized as a comedy about a Presidential doppelganger who finds himself in the most powerful seat in the most powerful office in the United States. He normally runs a temp agency, in other words, he actually finds sustainable employment for those that don’t have jobs. In, arguably, the best part of the movie, he gets together with his regular Joe best friend, a run of the mill accountant, and trims the budget to find a way to save a children’s homeless shelter. The movie reminds us that regular people built this government and there’s nothing wrong with a regular person running it. We don’t need to belong to a special club with special rules (like the Democrats or Republicans or Tea Partiers.) Those clubs, with their players, have not helped anyone other than themselves.
Has any candidate in the last 30 years balanced the budget? Has any candidate in the last 30 years fixed our environmental woes, increased the effectiveness of our educational system or our healthcare system or product/ drug safety? Has anyone of our “honorable” representatives, the representatives that are supposed to work for us, really done anything aside from pushing papers, dressing in fancy suits and crying while reading the Constitution? Has anything gotten better?
I am really starting to think that the last United States President that actually cared about the working/ middle class was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And that, folks, puts us WAY past the thirty year mark with which Egypt is dealing. Maybe he only cared to get re-elected, maybe not, but he did CARE and he took actions to acknowledge that fact.
From the time FDR left office, we have been inching towards the very lack of representation in government that caused a revolution for the colonists in the 1700’s. Take a walk down the street. Ask passersby. Or simply reflect on your own. When is the last time you actually felt represented by someone who actually understood your plight in the middle class? When’s the last time we elected someone to represent us that really was from the middle class. When’s the last time we had someone in office that knew what it meant to put off buying a new pair of jeans so that a utilities bill could be paid?
So then, the real question is, how do we, the common folk, take back our government? Is there a way to do it without violence? The Egyptians have been tying for peaceful change for 30 years. They have been working hard, trying to make the best of what choices their President had made for them. And where are they now?
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