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.