Is Egypt a Tipping Point or a "Now what?"

When history decides to shift, people are always looking in the wrong direction. That's what makes so-called tipping points so unsettling -- the experts miss them so often. In the case of Egypt, nobody expected peaceful popular uprisings to topple Mubarak. The Arab world was focused on the dangers of Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda or Israel. It was taken for granted that the repressive regimes of the Arab world were here to stay, backed by the military, secret police, and powerful friends on the side like the United States.

History apparently had different ideas, and so we stand at a moment like the fall of the Berlin Wall, where a society collectively says, "Enough is enough." The way in which collective consciousness makes such decisions is mysterious. The day before change occurs, there's every reason to think it won't. Hosni Mubarak had been in place for thirty years, Soviet Communism for seventy. What we will see now is a great deal of backing and filling as the experts tell us all the factors that made this a predictable upheaval, and the pro-Mubarak West eats a little crow for not supporting the protest movement quickly or strongly enough. One of the protesters had appealed to an American reporter, "Why can't you see that we are just like you?" A good question.

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