A thousand years ago, most of these people would have been busy working small plots in fields along the Nile. Many would have been pumping water. Some would have been sailing or rowing, on the vast fleets of boats, ships, and galleys. Others would be on caravans making long, slow trips across deserts. Lots of them would have been drafted into armed forces as spearmen, sling-throwers, archers, or charioteers.
Now, big tractors, giant farm implements, and motorized transports on land, sea, and air have put all those people in the picture out of work. These countries have lots of people permanently available to spend their spare time (they’ve decades of it) overthrowing their governments. The people in the penthouses and on the balconies of the buildings around the square are surprisingly unconcerned.
Egyptians, Algerians, and Tunisians (hard to tell where these pictures are from) are so desperate for something to do that millions of them prove that they are available for work, day and night until the government is overthrown.
A new government will soon arrive. It won’t have anything for them to do, either. But, they’ll make a great show of being “concerned”. In a few months, the new government will be identical to the old government. Years, or decades, later, new riots will start. The process will repeat.
People in such mobs often wave, make signs with their fingers, and wear clothes showing that they’re very serious about wanting to make things better. TV broadcasts shows how desperate some of the demonstrators are to get pictures of themselves broadcast on television shows, even ones they’ll never see.
Cunning thieves are along the fringes, waiting for broken windows to expose transportable valuables that can be taken and sold. Such thefts provide most of the economic hope that any of these people will ever have, except for immigrating to the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Few of those fortunate enough to escape will ever ask if deeper, more substantive changes than new tyrannies are necessary to make their nations more livable. They will, on arriving in new countries, be drawn into outposts of the same forces that caused such stagnation in their native land. Some think it’s a religious problem. They cannot easily escape.
The same inability to provide jobs for those displaced by automation exists in Greece, Spain, and other parts of the European fringe. Christian nations let social services absorb too much investment capital. Then, they simply don’t have the money to pay for the machinery and computers without which it is impossible for the coming generation(s) to escape poverty. Their desperation for more free lunches destroys their futures.
