The Arab Spring

In mid-December, 2010, in the city of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, a well-known and reportedly generous 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi was confronted, as he had often been, by local municipal officials, ostensibly for not having a permit to sell fruit in the street.  Lacking the funds to either obtain a permit or bribe the officials, one particular female official publicly humiliated him by slapping him, spitting on him, confiscating his scales, and tossing his fruit cart aside.  Angered by the confrontation, he attempted to lodge a complaint with the governor's office, and to ask for the return of his scales.  When the governor refused to even see him, he promptly acquired a can of gasoline from a nearby gas station, and in the middle of traffic, after reportedly shouting, "how do you expect me to make a living?", doused himself with the gas, and lit a match.  Although the flames were ultimately extinguished, the burns he suffered over 90 percent of his body caused him to slip into a coma, and 18 days later, he died.

Bouazizi's self-immolation would set off a series of mass protests, strikes, marches, rallies, and riots by the endemically unemployed and disaffected youth across the Arab world, first in Tunisia, then in Egypt, then in Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Morocco.  Some of these uprisings, as in Saudi Arabia, would be subdued by governing authorities; but others, as in Tunisia and Egypt, would lead to outright revolutions; still others, as in Libya, would lead to civil war.  And as of this date, it's not over.  In what is being called the Arab Spring, young Arabs, angered by the economic decline and political corruption in their respective countries, are taking to the streets in what some have called the "fifth wave of democracy," so called, as it brings to mind the "third wave", experienced throughout Latin America in the '70s and '80s.

To be sure, and the reason why we post this text, the United States is not immune to being the object of such protests as the Arab Spring is generating, as the sentiment of it begins to extend beyond Arab borders.  On Sunday last, while we were paying our tributes to those lost in the 9/11 tragedy, about 100 or so Arabs in England were burning an American flag in protest.  Yet, although many of us in the west are oblivious to the import of the Arab Spring, (after all, we have our own economic decline and political corruption to deal with), those of us who know our history can certainly empathize with democratic uprisings.  Hence, we are sympathetic to their cause, if only by necessity, tacitly so.