Diary of an Egyptian Schizo

Day 1:

I'm so happy we finally have a leader that WE chose having had proper elections. Everyone I sat talking with today is so happy, Ahmed, Mohammed, Omar everyone. We were very optimistic about this victory for the revolution and for our generation…

Now we can actually choose a new sect, or person or political party once every four years. So if any of them fail we can start over again with someone else…

I know, I know. There are a great many sects here in Egypt including the anti-Islamists, and the Christians are worried that the Muslim Brotherhood will hold onto power whatever it takes after Morsi and will try to infiltrate all the areas of free speech and media as well as all the other government sects and take control over everything and leave not the slightest chance of anyone else entering the election race or having any political power in the future, in other words exactly what Mubarak’s Watany Party did in our inglorious past….  

Well, we will see, and whoever thinks this generation will be easy to control, has no idea what our revolutionary contemporaries are capable of. They were probably asleep for the past two years and must have missed out on the whole thing….

I am optimistic!

Day 2:

This is nonsense!! Didn’t I tell you?? You should listen to me!! I always trust my feelings and I was skeptical since the day that Morsi got into office and since his speech in Tahrir Square!! Those Islamists cannot be trusted an inch!!! Now they are all over Egypt spreading fear amongst people: telling people that they will soon be forced into complying with their version of Sharia Law and that women will be forced to be covered!!! Says who? The Quran and Prophet Mohammed say “No compulsion in Religion”!! It's against Sharia Law itself to force someone into anything…besides a lot of the matters on which we differ with the Islamists have been subject to debate in Islam itself amongst its greatest scholars for 1400 years now - and they are not actually mentioned in the Quran… if God didn’t ask me to do this then YOU can’t force me to do it!! See? That’s what voting for Morsi brought down on our heads !! A great deal of rank ignorance!!

Day 3:

See? I always knew it was not true, all along!! Now we know for sure that it wasn’t the Islamists who were walking around threatening and scaring people. That was the bunch we refer to here as ‘the Folool’, the old supporters and members of Mubarak’s ancien regime who over and over again come out of the shadows and ruin anything good that comes out of this revolution….

Thank God the truth came out! God Protect you Morsi!!

And now Morsi has a 100 day plan where he promised to solve 67 major problems in Egypt including the traffic problem. We have access to a website now, called the Morsi Meter, that will show us when each these demands have been met..

Thank God we have someone like you in Office Morsi!!! Hamdullilah!

Day 4:

There has been no water supply to my area, which is considered an upper class area, in Heliopolis, for a day and a half now. And electricity still cuts out between 1 and 2 hours a day in my area. But I hear that lower class areas and other cities in Egypt have to put up with more than 5 hours a day of no power… leaving them sometimes to have power only for one hour to break fast and another late at night to have sohoor (the meal Muslims have late at night just before dawn which is when fasting starts in Ramadan)

It’s been more than 40 days and so far Morsi has not solved a single problem out of the 67 he said he would solve, and has actually added two more problems to them now, and not minor additions either – but  two necessities in which there was a better service available before the revolution, water and electricity!

The power cuts have been so ridiculous and frustrating that one occurred right in the middle of the new government's acceptance oath in the joint presence of Morsi and SCAF leader, Tantawi. The power cut them dead on live TV! And less than a week later there was a power cut on the entire metro system, forcing passengers to break their way out of train carriages and to file in large numbers from the tunnel and into the outside world again in the middle of a hot Egyptian August while fasting in Ramadan!

And to top all this, a huge disaster has happened in Sinai. The border guards there were attacked by unknown armed people and the power cut out over the whole border area… the attack used Israeli vehicles which the Israeli authorities claim were stolen from them. But who knows? And this left in its wake more than 15 Egyptian guards killed right after breaking their fast and praying at dusk… At this point we just don’t know what's going on…

When it comes to the electricity problem, Morsi's Government says the usage of electricity in Egypt is way too extensive and that it has to be reduced until this problem can be resolved by building more power plants. Well if this is true, how come this austerity problem didn’t exist during Mubarak's Era or even during the transitional period that followed the revolution?? There were no power cuts back then when we DIDN’T have a president in charge…

And in the Sinai attacks - I do accept the action Morsi took in firing the head of Egyptian Intelligence as well as the Mayors of Sinai, and (surprisingly) Cairo as well as others…. If anything this was a necessary step to calm things down.

Although as people we NEED to know why those people got fired, and if they had any involvement in what happened, as some people are suggesting that this must have had some insiders in on the plan as well as outsider foreign interference… We need to know what's going on since it is our own flesh and blood that keep getting killed at demonstrations, football games and even on border patrol now, and no one is ever punished for those murders!

And to top all this, Morsi's Government has hired most of its ministers from a list of Muslim Brotherhood members and affiliates, some of whom have never worked on such largescale projects before and have taken up positions they have no qualifications for… and to make things even more scary, the Brotherhood members in Parliament are in charge of the constitution as well as heading up the major newspaper and media outlets in Egypt which are now wholly in the hands of the Brotherhood and their circle of affiliates, they having fired all the old media heads who were in charge up to Morsi's election… And those who were not within their immediate reach were attacked in Media City as the Brotherhood’s main speakers  - people like Sheikh Safwat Hegazy – called upon the mass of the people to go out and hunt down all the "corrupt" media people who keep on trying to turn the people against Morsi… As one famous show host, Amr Adeeb, described it on air that day – this was a power move made by the Brotherhood to scare off all the opposition media. Thousands of Brotherhood members duly camped in front of Media City, not allowing any of the show hosts and studio workers in and out, and from time to time, physically attacking them and wrecking their cars…

By now I think you will have got the hang of this state of schizophrenia in which we dwell. When a leader runs after his sect’s goals only, marginalizing his own nation’s demands and needs at such a critical time, then there is a big problem… When a sect tries to eliminate all the opposing voices around them by force…  When a political party tries to be the only party around that has power…  this signals the beginning of a slippery slope. Arguably it took Mubarak more than 20 years to make that mistake but once he did… it was all over. This time our generation, which waited 30 years, is not willing to wait 30 months.

All in all we are telling ourselves to watch and wait till the 100 days have passed and let’s hope from our hearts that this is all paranoia and that Morsi can overcome this, our schizophrenia, with good actions. Although, developments so far seem all too clear in what they indicate; but for a last time, let’s hope.

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