Best Wishes to Egypt

I'm not a big news watcher, and these days my first thought is always, how distorted is the news from reality, still, the apparent awakening of the populace in Egypt struck me as classic democracy in action that I felt a desire to cheer when I first heard about it. It's never just the people all getting fed up with an out of date system all at once. There are surely triggers, though nothing necessarily that an outsider would notice or comprehend, but still, the need for change became recognized and thus we have a classic revolution, though it is unfortunate that it has turned to violence.

In some ways, I suppose that it is inevitable, though violence should never be. A man who has ruled for thirty years should be ready to retire, but no one likes to be pressured into change, especially into a change that feels like a loss instead of merely a change. the fact remains that no one can rule effectively for thirty years, even in middle management. The ivory tower at the top or even the upper windows of the corporation highrise, offers too poor a view of what is happening on the ground, and thirty years of memories, even if they are undistorted by time, convey nothing of the changes in technology, culture, attitudes, needs, and expectations. A leader cannot lead effectively a people that they no longer know.

A few years is typical, ten if the leader is a good listener and brilliant, but no one in a position of ultimate power can be effective for thirty years. If nothing else, being effective is typically exhausting unless there is a solid structure beneath doing most of the ruling and maintaining contact with the people. If that were true Cairo, I suspect there wouldn't have been more than a token protest, as a reminder, and the leader would have been more ready to step down to contented retirement long ago.