The warm winds of freedom.

February 1, Saint-Ismier.

It is cold here in the French Alps; the mountains in front of my mother's house have disappeared in a mass of grey clouds.
But there is a warm wind blowing on the other side of the Mediterranean.
It is a wind of liberation so sudden and so new that it feels like the dream of a drunken ship. It is a wind so powerful that it sweeps away fear, a fear so old it had become like fate.
Today Egyptians of all walks of life are demonstrating en masse in the streets of Cairo one week after protests started on the wings of the wind of revolution.
It is a warm wind, it was born in Tunisia last month on the ashes of a young man who died in December after setting himself on fire. Mohamed Bouazizi's gesture in a small town lost in central Tunisia ignited what has come to be called the Jasmine Revolution, a revolution that toppled longtime strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from power in only a few days. Ben Ali came to power in 1987 promising democracy and only strengthened the corruption and despotism that had marked the later years of the first president of the Tunisian republic, Habib Bourguiba.
In 1987 my best friend was Zohra Fetiti, she was a petite young woman who fascinated me with her wild streak, her mystery, and the sweet obscurity of her eyes. She was Tunisian. Ben Ali's ascension then meant a renewed hope for a country she barely knew, she was a child of emigration, the legacy of French colonialism, and I remember her divided between hope and disappointment, there had been no elections, but maybe this was for the best, and anyway it was far away, she was a Tunisian but she did her best to escape her country and her family's assumption of what that meant for a woman.
I wonder what she is thinking today, as the warm winds of freedom are suddenly, fiercely, thanks to her compatriots, spreading all over the Middle East and its assortment of West-backed dictators. The Jasmine Revolution was unthinkable a month ago, the Egyptian uprising even less so. Hosni Mubarak has been in power for longer than most protesters in the streets have been on earth, seated on a bed of fear, the population's fear of his police and his jails, the West's fear of radical Islamism.
It is exhilarating to see what is happening under the world's eyes, the media blackout imposed by the Egyptian regime in a desperate move to try to contain the wave not working in this age of defyingly fast communication technology advances; it is exhilarating to hear people in the Arab world finally speaking up, facing death - and many have died since the wind of revolution began blowing - for a hope they didn't know they could have, proud of shedding that fear; it is simply incredible to hear them voicing their love of country, democracy and freedom in a collective cry that can be felt all around the world - and the cold cold breeze of fear is suddenly in the other camp.
Mubarak could be out before the day is over. I wish I were an Egyptian today, just to feel that wind in my face - but I do.
The winds of my cold winter are warmed by a whole people's awakening, and the gift of dreaming the unthinkable.