By K.T.Nhamo.

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I felt embarrassed for the Americans when I heard the protesters in Cairo say that they wanted a democracy like that of the Americans.

The Egyptians have been fooled, too! Americans don’t have a democracy.

The majority of Americans have given up on being citizens. They’ve sunk into the passivity of Spectators and Consumers. What they have is a lot like what Egypt and Angola have: Corruption. Cronyism. A Military/Corporate state that lies and spies and works against the welfare of its own people, in secret.

A government justifies its attacks on human rights in the name of a Security Emergency. Americans now live in a nation where the Supreme Court has ruled that buying votes is legal.

How can they live with that shame? Probably because TV has numbed the Americans. Hundreds of channels, every one of them under the control of a corporation, with no accountability for the facts and fictions that shape the muddle of wants and resentments and brand loyalties that citizens bring into the voting booth– if they even bother to vote!

In Egypt, the people knew they were oppressed, and they knew the state-run TV was pure propaganda. Once they started talking to each other, talking past the differences of jobs and gender and class and age and religion, they realized that the corrupt and cynical are wrong: people united can change their lives for the better.