The Arab Spring was supposed to bring democracy to people who had lived under autocratic rule for decades. It has brought civil war and death instead. In a recent article titled “Reality Versus Mirages in Egypt”, Thomas Sowell succinctly describes the ongoing problems with the Arab Spring in the following passage:
However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free. Nowhere is such tolerance harder to find than in the Middle East.
As we are once more on the brink of a military intervention in the Middle East, I found this passage from Dr. King’s speech very moving:
Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring — when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
