Maybe it's having too much time on my hands to fill, but I have been glued both to Twitter and Facebook since the beginning of the Egyptian Crisis. I have posted on #Egypt through Twitter, to give my support to the people. I have added journalists who are covering the protests from within the action itself, and have listened to heartbreaking tweets through #speak2tweet.
What's amazed me the most is the apathy that I see throughout Facebook. Today, the groundhog got more attention than a country's people who are experiencing an increasingly violent suppression of their human rights.
Maybe it is a case of out of sight, out of mind. Maybe the apathy is due to a lack of understanding as to why it's happening in the first place. Maybe we are just tired; tired of being exposed to all of the not so pleasant aspects of the world around us...it's easier to ignore it and concentrate on our own worries because hey, it's not us.
But..could it be? Imagine if you didn't have the freedoms you hold dear. Imagine if the simple act of walking down a street was threatening. And yet we enjoy these freedoms because at some point in our earliest incarnation, there was revolution. There was a mass exodus of people who decided that they wanted to rule their own way, to have a choice. Hence our Constitution was born.
It's not perfect, and it's subject to scrutiny and misinterpretation every single day, but at least it exists. For that I am thankful. As everyone should be. Because the alternative is not something I want to think about. I can't imagine not being able to say as I feel, even if it goes against the grain.
If you do anything else today, take a moment and listen to someone's #speak2tweet's words. Read a news article from CNN or the New York Times, or the news program/blog/twitter feed of your choice and educate yourself as to what is going on around you. Because if you think it couldn't happen here, think again.
And while you're reading, give thanks that you can.
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