This was written 3 hours before Mubarak stepped down. The video was taken an hour after victory...
The expression, "mob rule" has always implied horrific abuses and irrational crimes. What is happening now in Egypt, with millions of citizens in the street, is the largest and most public "mob rule" that has occurred in my 56 years.
The unity, caring, responsibility and patience shown by the "mob" stands as an unanswerable testament to the decency of the human heart. Nobody is telling them what to do. What is happening is a pure reflection of the goodness of mankind.
Governments throughout the world, both despotic and democratic, use the fear of "the mob" as a way to strike fear into the public and thereby protect their own interests at the expense of the people they were charged with representing.
Would that those same governments would show the same decency as this "mob."
What "mob" would choose to go to war for any reason other than self-protection? It takes cynical leaders and ideology to foment violence between nations.
http://www.youtube.com/...
Direct democracy has not existed on a state level since Athens. Large countries and complicated decisions have made representative democracy a necessity for the last two hundred years. The emergence of the American democracy created the model upon which all other modern democracies have been based.
With the advent of the new media, it is reasonable to consider whether this model continues to be the only workable option for a democratic country. Why should important decisions be removed from the people who are affected by those decisions? Why should their input be limited to choosing representatives every few years rather than directly deciding these issues themselves?
The history of the US over the last tree decades has demonstrated how a representative democracy can be suborned to act in ways indistinguishable from the worst of dictatorships.
People in the US and in the other Western democracies are not yet suffering enough to take to the streets. If those governments continue on the path they have been traveling, it's only a matter of time.
Egypt is now in the position of actually showing the West a model that they can follow when the situation requires. The government officials and the talking-heads media pundits don't know what to say. The fear mongering using the boogy man of the "Moslem Brotherhood" has fallen on deaf ears.
Nobody can watch the pictures coming out of Cairo and believe that this is an evil, cynical danger to civilization. Quite the contrary. It is the greatest victory of civilization over the dark forces of violent dictatorship since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Whatever the ultimate result of the popular uprising in Egypt, it is important that those of us in the West learn from their example. It is time we began to consider changing our own systems of government to reflect the realities of the 21st, as opposed to the 18th century.
Change is both possible and necessary for the human race to meet the enormous challenges humanity now poses to itself as its population swells and its resources dwindle.
The world owes the Egyptian people admiration for their courage. It also owes them gratitude for showing the way forward.