#Jan25 #Tahrir These twitter tags changed the world.

•  Like most people I had heard of Twitter and tweets and the whole "let me tell what I'm doing to the world". My first thoughts were WHY?
•  I never "tweeted" until the last week of January 2011  and found myself tweeting about events in Cairo, Egypt during the history making uprising there. Interesting tweets started coming across my screen from people actually in Tahrir Square in Cairo.  @sandmonkey ,@etharkamal ,@Ghonim (yes THAT Ghonim),@litfreak, @ monaeltahawy , the news was real time and all to real.   Tweets came in that Sandmonkey had gone missing. His friends and fellow "tweeters" were frantic to locate him.  You feel real emotion pouring through their comments and at the pace they were coming across the internet all the way to my desktop in Florida,  USA.  After three days he reappeared, everyone was relieved and I was too even though I had never met this person. Sandmonkey had been arrested by the Egyptian Secret Police on his way to Tahrir Square with medical supplies for those injured in brutal pro-government attacks on the protesters. His car was demolished, his phone and laptop taken and he was detained for three days. He was lucky to be let out alive. He later appeared on CNN as did many of the bloggers and tweeters listed above. As the events raged on I tuned to CNN as they too were "Intweet" with many of the same people. Wow, what a way to learn to tweet. I feel like I was there or at least knew people there. 
•    Wael Ghonin (the Google executive) started this uprising.  He posted the Facebook Page  "We are all Khaled Said " http://www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk.   He did so to bring to light the brutal police killing of the 28 year old Egyptian man, Khaled Said and people like him, by the Cairo police. The picture of  the young, vibrant man before and then the horrific after picure brings such feelings of horror, then sadness, then rage to my heart. How can a country return a son to a mother in that condition?  This was where the roots of what transpired in the coming weeks sprouted.  Planned protest to demand a change from a brutal dictator and his regime on this country of 80 million was tagged Jan25. 
•    Thoughts of Iran in 2009, Tiananmen Square in China 1989 played in my mind.  We have all seen what usually transpires in these "student" uprisings. The idealistic ideas of freedom and democracy  by the 20 something generation is met with the cold hard brutality of  the reality of what controls this world:  bullets, tanks, blood and death. Deaths usually numbering in the 1,000s.  The surviving protesters go back home and face the bitter disappointment and futility of their actions and the world moves on, unchanged.  Americans usually applaud the attempt and then shrug and move on at the ending results. 
•    Cairo time is 7 hours ahead of me so when I went to bed late on the night of the 24th it was already sunrise there the 25th. The earlier night had seen violence on the protesters and the world media was being shoved off the streets. Tweets from Anderson Cooper had him hiding in his hotel and even the Arab network AliJareeza  had reporters brutalized. This was the precursor for a brutal crackdown . The nightmare was going to come in the morning. I wanted to say goodbye to my twitter friends, to tell them to leave the square, but they were brave, ready to die. I felt guilty, they were so young. 
•    I woke up early my time on the 25th around 7 AM which put Cairo at 2 in the afternoon.  I didn't want to log on and I didn't want to turn on the television to see what carnage had befell the people of Egypt in Tahrir square. When I did turn on the set all I could do was cry when I saw all those people.... there they were, a 100,000 or more. They prayed, orderly, defiant. So many had come to Tahrir Square that the government had to back down. In the face of the violence, the knowledge of what was more than likely going to take place they came anyway in overwhelming numbers.  That was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.  
•   Tweets of FREEDOM!!  and We DID IT!!    filled tweetdom on Feb 11, 2011 when Honsi Mubarak step down as President of Egypt.  I feel deeply enriched by having this tweet experience and will never feel the same about the internet and social media. Now I know Why.