Happy Purple Finger Day, Egypt

See it in your mind as I see it in mine. It's just after 9PM in Cairo, and a curious ten year old child, for these purposes we'll call him Abdul, is being settled into bed and is staring at his parents' index fingers, or more accurately, at the indelible purple ink which will be staining those fingers until it finally washes off completely . . .

Happy Purple Finger Day. With smiles on their faces, as you could judge by the camera images broadcast around the world, Egyptians are working slowly through the process of choosing a new government for themselves, a government they earned the right to choose by standing up and requesting it at the top of their lungs until the government in place read the writing on the wall and gave up the ghost of their regime. It wasn't easy, and as anyone on this side of the Atlantic will be glad to tell you, it isn't going to be easy. Down the road in Iraq, another group of smiling, purple fingered citizens could tell them that just as easily . . . Although the threat of being locked in a cellar with a reasonably psychotic gentleman with various painful implements for putting an "X" in the wrong place is no longer an issue.

They're taking there time with the process; watching it closely to make sure there's no cheating and telling the rest of the world it should take until mid-January until things run their course and a Parliament is chosen. It sounds like a plan to me, and someday, when little Abdul starts turning his finger purple on a regular basis, they'll probably be able to do it faster, all things progressing as the people want it to.

The boy is looking to his mother and father, and asking about the what the purple fingers mean. What they might be able to tell him is that the idea is simple. The image of Egypt is not to be what Pharaoh decrees, or the King demands, or what the current corrupt head of state arranges to have happen while he strips huge chunks of the country's riches from it. It is to be what they decide it will be. Everyone with a purple finger.

I Have Seen the Enemy, and He is Us

I've spent a little time away from the land of opinion the past few months while life was going on. It's good to see you again, although under these circumstances I might have just been better off alternately shaking my head and burying it in the sand. Somehow, WMAM (White Middle-Aged Male . . . Ooh boy children, ain't that scary!) that I am, I seem to be the enemy of most everyone on the planet . . . And I'm not even one of the ones with money.

Walt Kelly, the cartoonist who created a strip called "Pogo" used the intentionally grammatically incorrect statement which titles this peace to make a point over forty years ago, and I find it no more and no less accurate than it can be seen today, in our land of the pointed finger. Put a "Tea Party" member in the room with an "Occupy Wall Street" member and though both of them see massive problems with the current system, want things to change and are protesting against the status quo, there's a good chance you'll need a WWE referee, the National Guard and at least one particular photogenic 'gentleman' from the UC Davis area to separate them.

Neither side is happy. Neither am I. Anyone who has tried to navigate the island of Manhattan in the past months knows what I mean (Hey! Is your getting around and people making it to their jobs on time more important than our message?), and anyone who sees the headaches some of the more extreme forms conservatism can engender in a society knows what I mean. (Can't you see what's happened to our world? Our anti-establishment is better than their anti-establishment any day! Those naughty Democrats!)

One of the more interesting parts of living in a free society is the right to express an opinion in a public forum (Like this one). Keeping people from getting to work to get on with their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, or suggesting business executive pledge not to hire anyone until the supposed 'war against business' ends, is another.

One of the little sidelights in my life in acting, and locally I had a chance to take part in a production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", which is often held up as not only a dramatization of early American witch hunting, but of the later ills of the McCarthy era in hunting Communists. If you think we've grown out of this sort of thing, look around. I see a lot of hands out with their fingers pointed in dozens of different directions, and they are crying 'witch' again everywhere they point.

You are pointing at us, we are pointing at you, and everyone needs to put their fingers down, pick up their shovels and start digging their way out of this shit. It's an old school kind of solution, but it has been known to work.