Painting Pictures of Egypt

My kids like to try and "help" with things.  Sometimes, they can actually do something constructive; other times they are more or less neutral; and more often than not they can work directly against the good of the order.  When they want to "help" with dinner, I usually make some room, even if it's not convenient.  When they "helped" us stain our deck, we let them help, even though it meant rather more of a mess than it would have otherwise.  But when Michele and I are dealing with a tantrum, by one kid or the other, and their sibling wants to try and "help" with some little bit of input, it never really helps at all.
I don't blame them for wanting to help.  Tantrums by a seven year old are terrible things, and more than anything, when they're going on, you just want them to stop.  The thing is though, if you're not qualified or able to be an actual solution, you're going to make things worse.
I thought about this as I read the latest update from what is happening in Egypt.  They're having a heck of a tantrum over there right now.  Different groups of people have discovered that the populace has actual democratic power, probably much more actual democratic power than we have even here in the good old US of A.  The people have found that, if they get angry enough and take to the streets, the military will take their side against the politicians.  That seems like a pretty awesome thing, and a pretty dangerous thing.  Can you imagine if that happened here?  If the populace got so fed up with an ineffective congress and a crushing bureaucracy that we got together with the Army and just threw them the heck out of power?  That would be amazing, and really scary.
That's what is going on in Egypt right now.  There is a struggle for the soul of one of the most ancient and important societies in the world.  The people of Egypt have decided that they do not care to replace an autocracy with a theocracy, in large part because the theocracy didn't deliver the goods that they promised and things were worse instead of better.  While, as a Christian, I think it would be great to have a country where Christ is president (as Woody Guthrie liked to imagine), I think it is rather a different story to have a country run by fallible human beings who claim that God is on their side.
As it turns out, in the long run it was probably better for Egypt to get the whole Brotherhood era out of the way now, before the revolution really had time to fade away; before the fervor and the demand for a better way of being Egyptian faded into the warm comfort of the status quo.  Maybe it is a good thing that they realized that Morsi was just a slightly different version of Mubarak, before he had time solidify his power and create another sort of despotic hegemony and crush the bud of democracy in its infancy.
As it turns out, the freedom of self determination is kind of heady stuff, and rather addictive once you get a whiff of it.  But the actual practice of freedom is rather difficult, as the Israelites found out after a very short time in the wilderness, it wasn't too long before some people started longing to go back to Pharoah where at least they knew they would have food and water.  I guess that story involves Egypt too doesn't it?
It took the Hebrews forty years to become what they needed to be, but the pace of the world isn't going to wait for the modern Egyptians to wander around in the wilderness for that long.  They make us too nervous, but I'm praying that all the meddling siblings in this country and in Europe will have the grace and wisdom to know that their "help" isn't going to help and that they need to stay away until they're asked for something particular.