Let’s remember now in the late winter of the season of revolt in North Africa and the Middle East that a few months ago, Tunisia was the first nation to Tweet and Facebook its way to a new era, the fruit of its rebellion grown by the bit and by the byte, by the tweet and by the post.
Today a Tunisian named Heny tweeted this: “To the Kasbah, young Tunisians! The revolution needs us! Free Tunisia from the remainders of the corrupt regime. The achievement is not complete yet.”
As Americans, we find a special appeal in the idea of an unfinished revolution. We remember that we were not even truly free of the British until 1812, their forts and soldiers scattered till then across our country with little regard to American sovereignty.
Indeed, not until 1865 did we end the legal institutions of human slavery within our democracy. And it was not until 1971 that the sheriff in Yazoo City, Mississippi ended his practice of personally escorting black students brave enough to show their faces at once-upon-a-time white schools off to their more expected places at the shacks and shanties reserved for African American education. (Writer Willie Morris tells that tale fully and well in his book Yazoo – written well before his opus, My Dog Skip).
What we see and what we learn today from North Africa and the Middle East are very much about our own national influence, to say nothing of our own national soul. We have a past in this country – both bloody and beautiful, full of promise yet still incomplete in its vision of what American ought to be – that we cannot afford to forget or neglect, particularly when we see its echoes resounding across the world.
The.American.Word. 