By Bob Gibson
A Facebook user for several years, I never really thought of the social network as a great vehicle for revolution.
Friends share what they are doing and trade photos of their lives, our friends, pets and parties.
While I share thoughts about sports and weather with friends, young Egyptians and Tunisians share thoughts about freedom and torture.
Their parents and their former rulers did not understand the intoxicating mixture of social media, freedom and non-violent protest until it toppled tyranny.
A friendly debate at lunch on Feb. 9 with a former school board member defined the boundaries of our hopes and fears.
I told my friend, a gentleman who has traveled extensively and sampled the great wines of Europe, that I was certain the crowds in Cairo would chase out President Hosni Mubarak within days.
My friend, who has no Facebook account but reads extensively, drew on generations of knowledge.
He remained just as certain the Army would crack down to preserve the repressive regime.
Without Facebook and the spotlight of journalism, he would have won our wager.
In fact, any time during the past 50 years, he would have won the wager, but I believe in luck, pluck and the fortunes of Facebook.
For weeks, the sweet sounds of freedom have echoed in the Cairo street, but their continued successes depend as much on the power of social media as on honest journalism.
American reporting of the revolution, warts and all, was riveting to millions in this nation, yet mattered less than Egyptian and Arab network coverage.
Some American reporting fanned flames of fear of a dreaded Muslim Brotherhood takeover, as if democracy was a big threat to America.
I believe fear of Muslims all over the Middle East and America is as counterproductive to peace and security as fear of water is to good swimming opportunities.
The American fear of Muslims in Eqypt had been used by Mubarak as a wedge against ordinary people and against democracy.
However, as the Christian Science Monitor reported Feb. 12, lack of singular leadership had been a strength of the Egyptian freedom movement: “the leaderless nature of the uprising has been its strength, allowing the cautious Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood to make common cause with socialists, Coptic Christians, and middle-class youths who know they want a freer Egypt but are uncertain of what ideology should drive them there.“
Watching friends watch Al Jazeera English on Facebook, I decided to look online and was impressed with their extensive coverage from Cairo.
Facebook itself worked well as a technological tool of revolution because friends shared with each other their thoughts, outrage and sadness over beatings and torture of young protesters.
I found a Facebook group of thousands of friends called We Are All Khaled Said.
That group shared thoughts and songs centered around their feelings about 28-year-old Khaled Said, who had been tortured to death by two Egyptian police officers. The group became a rallying place for information and action to work against systematic torture and 30 years of running emergency law.
When Mubarak temporarily shut off access to Facebook, he was showing all Egyptian youth how terrified he was of them and their friends. Unable to handle their access to the truth, he blamed foreign threats.
Many thousands of Egyptians surrounded the state television building in Cairo as Mubarak’s last lies were told there. Now that state TV is free of that regime’s boot, it can chase after the Mubarak $70 billion of stolen Egyptian loot.
What the protesters posted on Facebook raced around the world, building bonfires of hope and asserting humanity.
The movement lives, grows and spreads. Peace activist Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam, is a member of We Are All Khaled Said using the group to help him write a song celebrating Egypt. I fondly recall one of his Virginia concerts in the 1970s as a beautiful spiritual event.
Using Facebook and other social media, music may prove a beautiful, powerful means of spreading non-violent protest and revolution where change is hard to come by.
