I was in Cairo earlier this year during the revolution. I took the semester off from school to travel, volunteer, seek out different job opportunities, etc. I was "evacuated" in early February. The experience had a profound and irreversible effect on my political consciousness, and I suppose those pieces are just beginning to settle.
I am now back in school, and I can barely stand it. I don't know if I'll be able to make it to class today. I feel immersed in this dangerous indifference, like I'm screaming as loud as I can without making a sound. The doors beep when you enter the library, and immediately I'm back in my apartment in the eery silence and people walked in and out of the hotel across the street, the entrance protected with armed guards, that same beeping sound as people left the hotel.
I see 20 or so people standing on the roof of their building and police begin burning the first floor. I see people my age shooting other people my age. It makes me want to cry, it makes me disgusted to be a human being. Little girls and their mothers unable to breathe through the tear gas as they try crossing the bridge home. Men looking at you beneath their helmets carrying machine guns.
And now I'm here in this academic atmosphere, all talk no action, no awareness. Of course there are pockets of responsible citizenship, but just being in the library listening to conversations going on around me is setting my brain on fire. I can't stand it.
<Edited by CB - please leave a complete blank line between paragraphs for ease of reading, thanks>
I am now back in school, and I can barely stand it. I don't know if I'll be able to make it to class today. I feel immersed in this dangerous indifference, like I'm screaming as loud as I can without making a sound. The doors beep when you enter the library, and immediately I'm back in my apartment in the eery silence and people walked in and out of the hotel across the street, the entrance protected with armed guards, that same beeping sound as people left the hotel.
I see 20 or so people standing on the roof of their building and police begin burning the first floor. I see people my age shooting other people my age. It makes me want to cry, it makes me disgusted to be a human being. Little girls and their mothers unable to breathe through the tear gas as they try crossing the bridge home. Men looking at you beneath their helmets carrying machine guns.
And now I'm here in this academic atmosphere, all talk no action, no awareness. Of course there are pockets of responsible citizenship, but just being in the library listening to conversations going on around me is setting my brain on fire. I can't stand it.
<Edited by CB - please leave a complete blank line between paragraphs for ease of reading, thanks>
