EGYPT AS AN ICON IN SHIFT TO DEMOCRACY

Egypt is more than just Egypt; it is an icon in a much bigger fight. President Morsi has been under siege for 5 days: riots and the like. The point of this blog is that it took us 7 years of shooting and killing war to even gain the right to form our democracy not to mention actually forming it—which we are still doing.  We switched from a monarchy to democracy. It wasn’t easy. Ours was the first democracy in history. Egyptians may not use the battle cry “Remember Valley Forge”,  in front of the presidential palace but that is what Americans should remember when criticizing them for violence.

Morsi leads in publicity in the fight to shift from a caliphate to a democracy. It may not be the first such shift in history but the size of Egypt makes it is an important one. In spite of the fact that the people elected him democratically, even he has not learned what real democracy means. He wants to control Egypt as a dictator, which is no different from Assad wanting to hang on to power in Syria. Both want to do the impossible that is use the “religious right” to hold on to power at the same time prevent a caliphate (religious leaders picked by Allah) from forming. The young and educated people see the fallacy of religious leadership with the extremes of Sharia law; they want democracy with secular law and they know that radicalized religious radicals and not some mythical spiritual Allah is doing the picking. This shift in the basic form of government in the Middle East may even more difficult then our own shift from a king to president. In the United States, how many times have you heard references to an “empirical presidency” (Nixon) or “faith based initiative” (George W. Bush) as coded language for monarchy or biblical law? Both stand as direct threats to our democracy. After 236 years, we still have to be vigilant or even stand in front of our “presidential palace”.