Living in Fear

Thursday, May 11

I sit at my desk.

[Sirens in the distance. They always worry me, make me feel there's someone I've forgotten who may hurt. So I take out my phone, dial all the numbers I know, make sure they're ok]

My sister sends me an email.

[A friend has been jailed for weeks; they shaved his head and aren't giving him his insulin, his health is deteriorating. All this because he protested the jailing of two brave judges who had the guts to say our presidential elections were fraudulent. I remember him in Basata with his girlfriend, the way he held her in the water. He was such a sweet boy]

She says she wishes she was in Cairo so that she could take part in the demonstrations.

[I spent most of my college years in a state of panic whenever there was news of a protest on the streets. Our university is right on Tahrir Square, the main downtown square in Cairo where every demonstration takes place. Students would round each other up, get into a state of euphoric excitement, and join the bigger crowds for minutes before chaos breaks out; people get beaten up and arrested. If they're lucky. I would run around campus, looking for my sister while my parents called me every two seconds, asking for her and is she ok? Take care of her, don't let her get beaten up, and finally I would find her and smack some sense into her. Even now, that panic still stays]

It's not clever to be vocally political. It's not clever to use your voice and body to protest a regime that's too stupid and far too heavily armed to bother to listen. What fools thought that this government actually cares if a few hundred get tortured and a few dozen die? We're a population of 78 million, the less, the merrier, right? And after all, isn't fear the best weapon to master so many people?
Keep them stupid. Keep them scared.

[Journalists have been barred from entering the area, that's why there's very little video or image coverage of the demonstrations today. The police seem to have a campaign that specifically targets them, so far Al Jazeera and other news channel reporters have been beaten up and their cameras bashed to pieces.
Clever little Egyptian government caught on to the fact that their biggest enemy is not their own people, but the cameras that capture images that they deny ever took place. Then the outside world catches on, shakes its finger at Egyptian government, who promise to be weely weely good next time. We'll only beat them up once they're in jail, okay?
Okay!]

I feel scared. And angry. And I wonder how it will be ten years from now, ten months from now, ten days from now. Will this country become the third world bundle of hunger and chaos and misguided fury that it is threatening to be?

Will there ever be a time where there are curfews and restrictions, barriers on every corner of every street, men in cigars trade sugar and water like they're drugs, and we don't sleep at night, waiting for someone to come take us away to those prisons that don't exist with the lost people who were stupid enough to speak their minds or wear a different colour or laugh in the face of fear?

[will there ever be a day when I leave this country, seeking asylum? and then never come back, fearing my name on some list, missing my relatives, my childhood home, the smell of the air at night, the walk along the Nile?]

I call him up.