One of the stories that most struck me is the story of young, educated, Egyptian men cleaning up the garbage in Tahrir Square. Thomas Friedman describes the scene as follows in today's New York Times:
more after the flip
I spent part of the morning in the square watching and photographing a group of young Egyptian students wearing plastic gloves taking garbage in both hands and neatly scooping it into black plastic bags to keep the area clean. This touched me in particular because more than once in this column I have quoted the aphorism that "in the history of the world no one has ever washed a rented car." I used it to make the point that no one has ever washed a rented country either — and for the last century Arabs have just been renting their countries from kings, dictators and colonial powers. So, they had no desire to wash them.
Well, Egyptians have stopped renting, at least in Tahrir Square, where a sign hung Thursday said: "Tahrir — the only free place in Egypt." So I went up to one of these young kids on garbage duty — Karim Turki, 23, who worked in a skin-care shop — and asked him: "Why did you volunteer for this?" He couldn’t get the words out in broken English fast enough: "This is my earth. This is my country. This is my home. I will clean all Egypt when Mubarak will go out." Ownership is a beautiful thing.
Back in the late 1960's, one of my political science professors described an encounter a few years earlier with a student from Egypt who came across the professor mowing his lawn on a hot summer day, dressed in blue jeans and a t-shirt and sweating profusely. The student said to him, perhaps not in these exact words, but this is the essence, "In my country, a man in your position would never be seen doing physical labor like this." The professor said he told this student, "Until that changes, things will never really change in your country."
In recent days, that has finally changed. In addition to the young man described by Thomas Friedman, young Egyptians (both men and women) have united to do the hard, dirty work that has been necessary to hold this movement together. When young people see it as an honor to collect the garbage from their countrymen who believe in democracy, things are indeed changing. And tonight, I consider myself an Egyptian.