a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

The Egyptian people have triumphed over their dictator today, February 11, 2011, and dealt a blow to their country’s whole post-war history of military rulership. They have set an example for the peoples of their region and everywhere. The celebrating millions, who had protested for thirteen days in Tahrir Square and in squares and workplaces across Egypt’s cities, come from all walks of life and educational backgrounds, all religious and secular sectors, all classes, genders and ethnicities. But what was most striking about the crowds, and is most striking about the population of Egypt, is their youth. Their “median age,” as demographers say, is 24.

In the media, the revolutionaries are called “the Facebook generation.” One of the turning points in the struggle came when an executive at Google, Wael Ghonim, described his harrowing detention by Mubaruk’s security police. Many saw the interview on Dream TV, a private channel, millions more on the Internet. And his words, the tears running down his face, re-inspired “the Facebook generation” to stay at their posts in the Square, to keep up their actions and their vigils, to overcome their fears of the police and their anxiety about what the army would do.

Facebook is certainly the electronic public square of this generation. The forum beyond the physical forum; the assembly place around the assembly on the square. And it is one of their key strategic communications methods, too. A front page photo in the New York Times of a group of young people huddled in semi-darkness around their red Mac computer, like field officers in a battlefront tent, was worth a thousand words about how the young, accustomed to electronic connection, had become political organizers, connectors.

But, to me, the Facebook tool that the young have so easily and creatively at their command is less significant –although, for the moment, more crucial—than their faces, in the street and on Facebook. Their faces show the awakening they are experiencing: the enlivening, the thrill of being expressive and expressing themselves, the transformational leaping out of daily oppression into freedom, the breaking of thought habits to see the world anew, full of new possibilities.

The faces they –and we—see now are responnding to the face that first brought them together. The face of Khaled Said, who was a beaten to death by the Egyptian security police last June 6 –to outrage across the country, across classes, from young and old. A few days later, Wael Ghonim and his colleagues posted photos of Khaled on a memorial Facebook page with the caption: “We are all Kahled Said.” The young activists who created that Facebook page probably knew what they were echoing: “Nous sommes tous ‘indesirables,’” which was the caption on the famous Atelier Populaire poster showing the young Daniel Cohn-Bendit –‘Danny the Red’– in May, 1968 when he was deported from France as an “undesirable” by a tottering Gaulist regime. “Nous sommes le pouvoir” announced the triumphant poster that went up in Paris when De Gaulle left the country, dissolved the National Assembly, and called for an election. Those hand-printed posters have been echoed in all the “We are all…” slogans of solidarity and People Power that have accompanied the non-violent youth-led revolutions since that “year of the young rebels.”

With “printing” means far more quick than the Atelier Populaire presses and lightening speed in delivery, the history-laden Facebook page devoted to Khaled Said helped spark the January 25th Cairo demonstrations. Then, every day the protesters carried poster-sized blow-ups of Khaled’s bright, handsome, hopeful young face as they marched; and they also carried posters of the police morgue photo of his battered, bleeding, mutilated face.

Photojournalists brought to us all, the witnesses of Egypt’s revolution, the faces of the future. There (in the New York Times last week) was the face of Sally Moore, age 32, a Coptic Christian, daughter of an Egyptian and an Irishman, a feminist, a leftist, and a psychiatrist. She had gone to the Square to join the demonstrations and realized that she needed to return the next day as a doctor, with her bag of bandages and surgical instruments. Then she started organizing, allying with the Muslim Brotherhood members of the Arab Doctors Union, and soon emerged as one of the leaders in the system of seven streetside clinics where injured protesters were treated. There she was in the photograph, looking straight into the camera, beautifully composed, confident. A cosmopolitan face.

“The Facebook Generation” is also the generation of the new cosmopolitans. These young do not relate to people according to the color of their faces, the clothes and costumes of their religions, their class. They do not begin with appearances–appearances that, in their symbolic density, have undone for people trained in aversion and prejudice so many possible beginnings of acquaintance, conversation, and friendship.

This revolution in Egypt is a microcosm of the cosmopolitan revolution that has been slowly unfolding around the world in the decades since 1968 –against enormous and often violent resistance. In ways subtle and not so subtle it is bringing down barriers of all sorts between individuals and among peoples. This is the news behind the news, and it is very good news indeed.

We went out to dinner last night to celebrate the end of the week, Friday, as the end of an era for Egypt and for the Middle East. To lift a glass of New Zealand white wine and wish the Egyptians well; to express our gratitude to them for what they have done, for themselves, for us, for people all over the world. Getting to the restaurant, where a young all-white jazz band was warming up for its first set, wearing retro outfits that self-styled them as heirs to the African-American jazz revolutionaries of Harlem, we walked down Bloor Street West. All around us were the University of Toronto young, meandering in groups, dipping in and out of the sushi shops, the Italian bistros, the Thai take-out kitchens, the James Joyce Irish Pub, The Himalayan Restaurant, the Country Style Hungarian Family Restaurant, a cheap and hearty goulash joint.

Their groups are completely inter-mixed in every way you can think of except age. By gender, by nationality, by religion, by ethnicity, by sexual preference. They wear whatever to protect themselves from the sub-zero Great Lakes weather. Tonight we passed some Japanese young in fur-lined Trapper hats, a tall Kenyan with his national flag sewn on his ski-mask, a Jamacian wrapped in a black-and-white Palestinian keffiyeh—all in the same group. The Muslim women behind their veils do not avoid the Tim Horton’s coffee shop where a group of young South Americans go on Friday nights to play cards and joke in Spanish or Portuguese with the girls who run the counter there, who are Mexican. On the corner at Brunswick, we passed a blond, ‘big-boned girl from Alberta’ (to use a phrase from k.d.laing, the beloved gay Canadian singer, of English, Irish, Scottish, German, Russian Jewish, and Sioux ancestry) necking with an Indian who sounded like he should be anchoring the news on the BBC. The traffic in and out of the Transzac (an abbreviation for Toronto Australia New Zealand Club), the concert hall and bar next door to our restaurant, is always full of gay boy comedians and wise-crackers of all colors and styles and their less identifiable entourages, male and female.

Whenever we walk out onto Bloor Street, we feel that we are surrounded by the cosmopolitan revolution. And when we got home, it came to our house in the form of Christine’s daughter, age 35, who needed to use our copier to prepare some packets for her Saturday morning ELL class. She is an elementary school art teacher, now adding ELL training to her skill set. In Canada educators don’t speak anymore of English As A Second Language (ESL), because they realize that lots of their students have more than one language before they get to class –our Iranian exile neighbors have children who as preschoolers spoke Persian and French—and because ESL seems to privilege English instead of offering it as one language among many that a student could be learning at school. They could as well be doing French Language Learning, or Chinese Language Learning. This renaming is not a matter of political correctness, it is a recognition that, while English is spoken widely (so many of the Egyptian demonstrators spoke to the BBC and the CBC reporters in English!), in a cosmopolitan world more and more people will be polyglot and will want to know not just multiple languages but the theory and practice of language acquisition so that they can more easily learn the languages they need.

So, Christine’s daughter was off to teach the even younger cosmopolitans, the ones who
will find each other’s faces on who knows what medium that will be available to them when they come of age. They will be, appropriately, photo-and-phonetics learners. Their teachers will have the skills to assess their needs individually, and write a report like the one Christine’s daughter wrote for her class: “Our student is new to Canada and performs at Stage 1: accordingly, we recommend “Word By Word, Longman Picture Dictionary.” It presents over 3000 words through lively full-colour pictures and scenes. Pictures attached to words convey more meaning than the words alone.”