Friday, February 18, 2011
What happens when, between the time you schedule your rally and the time it actually happens, there’s a revolution?
That’s what happened to Bethany Heath. She scheduled a rally in support for the anti-Egypt protesters two weeks ago. Then Mubarak complicated things by getting himself removed from power.
But today, from 4 pm to 5:30, at the point where Division Street splits into the Division-Ruby couplet (near the Wendy’s), the protest/rally is happening anyway.
First, she says, the struggle in Egypt isn’t over yet. They have a long road to build a democracy.
“Things are ready for something good to happen,” Heath says. “[But] things are still really precarious.”
Nobody wants Egypt’s revolution to go the way of the revolution that overthrew the Shah in Iran, she says, arguing that the Egyptian people — and the entire Middle East — need support in their efforts to build a democracy.
And then, she says, it’s a rally to rally for rallies themselves.
“What I want to do is to get people together, and get them used to the way things are going to go — rallying and organizing and demonstrating,” she says. She points to the massive teachers union’s protests in Wisconsin, as an example. “Legislators will respond if [the people] get together and tell them to respond. Protesting — that’s pretty powerful.”