Is History Revisiting?

You can hear shouts, beeping into your eardrum, "freedom, jobs, hope, etc.", these luminous words, breaking the silence of the blinding glare of the African continent under the sun, trenching the banks of the Nile.

They said, "Tian'anmen Square is coming back to Tahrir Square"; no, no bullets please, no massacre please, people in the other parts of the world pray while the protesters forged ahead, piercing into the immense tense of the curfew.

I wasn't there in Beijing in 1989, nor at Cairo in the early spring of 2011. But I can still recall the scary snapshots from the news, in the suffocating summer of 1989, when my dad picked me up from school and riding by the square of my hometown, a 2nd tier city in north China, I remembered the faces of the starve-striking young college students. I also remembered my parents trying to cover my eyes when the 7pm CCTV Daily News was broadcasting the aftermath of a conflict in Beijing (among who?) in that June and a young solder, lying next to the body of another young man, both dead, with the solder's belly cut open and his intestines hanging out of his body, smoked, with flies roaring above...

I linked an emotional disgust to any kind of violence since then. I know that the progress of history needs blood sacrifice sometimes. But what if history does not swirls up, but revisits again and again?

There are many ways to interpret the motivations, institutional reasons and historical perspectives of the protests going on in the Middle East now. Although I am personally very interested to know the relationship of the level of social capital and human capital of one nation to its people's requests for more rights and democracy, but for now, I only hope that NO VIOLENCE toward people will happen, ever.