Tag: Egypt

Movements

In the latest  issue of the New Yorker we find a cartoon, showing two women with huge brand-name shopping bags, blurting out “I am going to start my own Occupy movement on 57th St”.

Scott Peck, on Organization, observes that organisations go through phases: honeymoon , chaos then, compromise before reaching full functioning.

Movements however are little bit different (spontaneous and horizontal spread) e.g. Ms movement.

Wonder Woman, shopping for Wonder Bread and raising wonderful children, although a few grew up to be “flower-children”.

If you want to understand the human potential movement, you need to see that “naked gestalt circle” in TIME. We were into breathing, feeling and (organic) gardening.

The thing about movements is that they morph and move on.

In their wake, Ms movement for instance, we have a whole generation of children grow up without close supervision from either parent (pre-Mr Mom era).

I was both fortunate and unfortunate to grow up with two sets of parents: one biological, and the other, already-grown-up siblings (who to this day can’t grow out of their surrogate role). With two women of the house being out of the house, I learned to grow up quick on my own.

While sorting through various upheavals, from the British Invasion (Beatles) to “the Invasion of the Body Snatchers“, I was mindful of movements, but always missed out on them by a few years (sexual revolution, de-apartheid movement, organic movement and computer revolution).

There is nothing inherently evil or good about movements. It’s an exploitable situation when people are seeking and open to change e.g. Jim Jones and San Diego suicide pact. One can easily be swept away in clashes and chants, in mobs and marches.

The very leaderless nature of a movement gives it both authenticity and vulnerability. By the time it fizzles out, we have no central figure to blame (or send city-sanitation bills to).

In Egypt, they had arrested a Google executive, but a few days later, he was surprised that the Arab Spring had taken hold during his detention.

Right now, the movement to go online (shop until you drop) has surely advanced way pass its honeymoon phase (dot.com) and chaotic phase (dot.com burst).

Web 2.0 is here to stay (Groupon was so confident that it had refused Google’s best offer) and to push to the Cloud (Facebook has just picked Sweden to anchor its large server farm). A digital joke: can your parent tell a server from a waiter? Or as in our New Yorker’s cartoon, Occupy Wall Street vs Occupy Fifty-Seventh St?

When it comes to movements, you need to zoom out and take a balcony view. While having less fun, detachment helps you see the DNA strand that runs through all : dis-contentment. History is made up of movements, large and small. In my short time, it just happens to be full of both. Now, where should we Occupy next?

flat “pyramid”

Viewed from above, the Pyramid in Egypt looks flat,  almost origami-like. And viewed from where I am sitting, the 18-day Revolution looks protean: leaderless, collaborative and spontaneous.

Although not the first to use Twitter ( Iranian post-election was), last week’s protesters showcased coordination and team work only digital natives can pull off.

First, they understood the power of organization i.e. the means (self-organized citizen patrol),

the mode (social media) and the manner (being kind to soldiers, just stop short of ” wearing some flowers in your hair”).

Second, they staged their demonstrations to appeal to Western media, their conduits to the developed world, Mubarak‘s entrenched base of support ( note the use of sound bites, and visual symbolism e.g. burned effigy).

Third, collaborative model. They built tents in the square, make-shift first-aid stations etc… like  Woodstock without the mud slide.

And they were young, urbane, well-conversant in English ( to offer comments on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera).

The tipping point was when their expat counterparts flew back to join them while Westerners, American “non-essential” community, were evacuating for fear of the worst .

In The Future Arrived Yesterday, the author argued for the Protean Organization (boundary-less with a soft core). To unseat the Pharaoh who sat on top of the Pyramid takes a lot of thumbing (texting) (in 1989, they had to use electric saws to cut down the Wall).

This youth revolution, despite being leaderless, wasn’t disorganized. Its flat “org chart” was in contrast to the traditional command-control style.  It accommodated many sub-cultures (tech, youth, urban, westernized, pro-democracy) and world views, secular and religious. Their future arrived not a day sooner.

In all, they managed  to un-brand the leader (dictator) and throw a red carpet in front of the new flat pyramid for Nobel-prize winners from abroad and Muslims albeit Brotherhood Muslims at home, and any one in between (including a Google executive).

Even the author of the World is Flat was taken by surprise when he witnessed his ideas jump off the page into the middle of the Square, Tahrir Square.

Burning flesh, jasmine scent

I used to live just a few blocks from where it happened on that fateful day in 1963.

As an active kid, I joined the throng to witness history in the making: monk’s self-immolation as a peaceful act of protest against the Diem’s dictatorship.

The city had been permeated with the smell of tear gas on days leading up to this event http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2043123,00.html

We rubbed lime to soothe our eyes’ sore.

When I read about Tunisians tweet and text to recommend Coke for eye relief, it brought back memories .

The jasmine revolution got its start from those similar flames. Flames of conscience objectors who preferred death to drift and dignity to dumb-down.

We have watched with incredulity how a Zippo flip from Tunisia could inflame the streets of Cairo.

And how quickly the scent of jasmine spread in carosene region .

People pray and people pay the price (thanks to the doctors who bandaged the wounded) to bring down Pharaoh. Instead of casting votes, they cast stones. As I can recall, it was serene and surreal at the intersection of Le Van Duyet and Phan Dinh Phung street . Young monks chanted quietly to send their master to Nirvana. There were a few hundred present at the event (including an award-winning NYT war correspondent).

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Peaceful and principled.

Every body knew what it was all about: the Diem’s family ruled the country: big brother was president, younger brother – head of internal security, and his wife, unelected spoke person for the regime. Madame Nhu was quoted in a press conference (perhaps on her shopping trip abroad, though not for as many shoes as counterpart  Imelda Marcos) “they are welcome to barbecue themselves ….”

History recorded that her husband and brother-in-law, dictators of former Vietnam, were assassinated on their way to the Chinese District. Their deaths weren’t honored and their departures not as peaceful as the monk’s. “What good for a man to gain the world and lose his own soul”.

If you were to witness that sudden burst of flame, and the resolute stillness of the monk, you, like I, would never forget. It will be the same years from now about that jasmine scent that floats from Tunisia to Egypt and onto Libya.

Use lime, it’s better than Coke.