As I was watching This Week on ABC this morning, they had a brief clip of a woman in Tahrir Square after Mubarak stepped down. She said, jubilantly, "We can do everything!" For me, that may be the biggest lesson from the 18 days of protest that toppled the former autocratic ruler and US ally.
All too often, we are limited by what we believe to be possible. But those limiting beliefs are self-fulfilling prophesies. If we believe something is impossible, then it is. We fail to attempt it or put in a half-hearted effort, convinced that failure is inevitable. So it is. Indeed, it becomes our excuse for not even trying. We find comfort in believing that we saved ourselves from disappointment and wasted effort. But it is a coward's alibi for inaction and complicity.
My own life is full of wonderful examples of people telling me, over and over again, that something is impossible, only to find out that it is, indeed, possible. Sometimes, I even found that it was relatively easy. It seems that once we reach and cross over that tipping point where something that seemed impossible now seems possible, we realize it is actually the status quo that is fragile and impossible to maintain. Change is inevitable, and the momentum shifts toward the change we now believe in.
People told me I couldn't go to college a year early, after my junior year in high school. But I did.
People told me I couldn't pass the Foreign Service exam, and certainly not on the first try. But I did. (By one point!)
People told us we couldn't get the US House of Representatives to pass legislation lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia. But we did - a mere six months after forming the American Committee to Save Bosnia and less than five months after starting our advocacy campaign. And a year later, we passed it in both houses of Congress by veto-proof 2/3 majorities!
I am proud of these achievements, but they pale in comparison to those of countless other people who have truly accomplished the previously unthinkable.
People said when I was growing up that the Iron Curtain would never fall. But it did. I was fortunate enough to witness the collapse of Communism first hand from my posting in Moscow. even got to help tear down the Berlin Wall with my own two hands and was an election monitor in the first free and fair elections ever in the history of the Soviet Union. I saw the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union stand up and demand their freedom. With the exception of Romania, each revolution was peaceful and relatively swift.
People said we would never elect an African American to be President of the United States - but we did.
And, now, after people said for decades that the Mubarak regime could never be toppled, the people of Egypt took to the streets for less than three weeks and showed, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., before them, that non-violent protest can achieve the impossible.
So when we talk in this country about how it seems impossible to stop a genocide in Darfur or the Congo, or to fix our inadequate education system, or to take back control of our political system from the big corporations and wealthy Americans who currently dominate it, or to reduce our federal budget deficit or fix Medicare and Social Security, or to solve the climate change crisis, let us remember the people of Egypt and Tunisia. They accomplished something "impossible" by believing they could and then doing it.
We really can do everything!
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