Gen Z & the Revolution| It is time for the January generation to step aside

I did not know then how regimes fall, or even what a “regime” meant.

I was only seven. All I could do was watch Al Jazeera channel with its screen split into several small boxes, whenever I got hold of the remote. I asked my mother why the screen was broken. She answered that the truth cannot be seen whole unless we piece together the fragmented scenes.

I remember anchors speaking quickly, guests interrupting one another, the streets shaking, and beneath it all a news ticker that never stopped galloping. My parents watched with no break, objected to certain words, then suddenly laughed. My mother cried every time a bouquet of “flowers blooming in Egypt’s gardens” appeared on screen.

My aunt kept repeating a question that remains unanswered to this day. “They killed them, they shot them dead—this boy is the same age as Basma (her daughter). What would his mother do now?” I watched their faces more than I watched the TV, fearing to pose the obvious question: what is a revolution?

And when I heard my father’s friends singing “What is Going On”—a song that hurled accusations against tanks crushing protesters, courts branding civilians as thugs, and leaders starving and dividing the people—I sang along with them, but I sang the words as questions, not accusations.

A gas canister and childish conspiracies

When we stopped playing hide-and-seek at school and started playing “revolutionaries and soldiers,” I was always on the revolutionaries’ side. Not because I understood anything, but because “revolutionaries” felt like the natural choice; to run forward rather than stop others from running.

During recess, when the “clashes” intensified at Heliopolis Primary School, I never took a step back, no matter how few comrades remained. I saw retreat as shameful.

Meanwhile, the grown-up revolutionaries in the streets were retreating one step after another, sometimes because of schemes, sometimes divisions, and sometimes massacre. As for us children, we were almost taking control of the flagpole in the courtyard, which to us was a miniature square, as though controlling the flagpole might add more art and music classes to our miserable timetable.

During our library classes, my mates and I in class 2A, along with the delinquent kids of class 3B, held our first political debates, each defending whatever they had heard at home the night before. And while the school seemed instinctively inclined toward the “spirit of January,” even without understanding it, 3B was nearly the only class that stood against the revolution.

When we returned to the “revolutionaries and soldiers” game, they did not come as casual opponents. They came wearing school preefect badges resembling the military police insignia that had spread through the streets during the curfew.

The game ended after the “brutality of the school police” escalated and someone broke the rules—and the glass of the school counsellor’s office—with a stone. But it did not end outside the walls.

The next morning, the principal announced during the assembly that what was happening was “nothing but a farce.” I did not understand whether he meant us or what was happening outside. Was he scolding children who crossed the line, or a country that had slipped out of control?

He then issued a two-point decision: behaving comes before education, and zero tolerance for politics inside the walls of our school. But politics did not need permission to prevail.

It arrived in the form of a tear gas canister that landed in our playground, shortly before the end of the fourth period, as a protest passed near the school.

“Pay no attention to it,” the class teacher ordered us, swearing that understanding long division was easier than understanding what was happening outside. He said it as if he were saving us, as if what was unfolding beyond the window were mere street noise, not a fate slowly approaching our future.

It was a lesson of a different kind. Survival through indifference, escape from thinking about performing our “duty,” and planting the idea of “it’s none of my business” in our minds, an idea that would later mature into “individual salvation.”

Yet our real lesson was not long division. It was the division between a classroom we were meant to stay in, and a street we were not meant to look at.

“Is there light at the end of the tunnel?”

My mother finally gave in and took me with her. She did not tell me where we were going at first. She only said, “you’ll see something nice.”

On the way to Tahrir Square, there were more people than usual, and less hurry. No shouting drivers, no passing insults, just a slow movement like walking inside a dream one doesn't want to wake up from.

When we arrived, my mother took off her tour guide’s hat, and merged into the chanting crowds during one of the February 2011 million-man marches, leaving me struggling with the moment. I did not understand why the place seemed larger than I knew it to be.

I did not grasp all the chants, the banners, or the heavy words floating in the air. But I understood one thing clearly: everyone there was happy, strangers behaving as though they had known each other for a long time. I remember young men taking photos, men crying without shame, women raising their hands as if bidding farewell to fear.

Years later, when I tried to recall that day, I realized that this was January’s strength and its weakness at the same time. The collective feeling that dreaming is possible, and the temporary neglect of “what comes next?”. I realized that the grown-up revolutionaries believed, even if only for a moment, that dreaming was enough.

The square was beautiful because it did not think for long, it was fragile for the very same reason. And perhaps that is why, when the moment ended, the grown-up revolutionaries did not know how to leave it peacefully.

The New Republic

The revolution is over. It is not “ongoing,” as the poster my father hung in the hallway leading to our kitchen claimed.

I became a young journalist, wrestling with censorship, newsroom policies, and my mother. Struggling to report stories that might slightly mention one of the state’s institutions or one of the distinguished officials of the new repblic.

The press law changed from what it once was. Video reporting about rising vegetable prices became an act carrying “unsafe and unpredictable consequences,” as a senior colleague— and my mother—put it.

Fifteen years on, it does not seem to me that the January Revolution left behind enough proof that it passed through my town. The streets changed, they became wider. People grew farther apart and more isolated. Faces changed. Even the language we once used had become suspect. Every material trace implying that someone had once stood here and exclaimed “no!” has been erased.

Memory was rebuilt to suit a “new republic.” Rumbles of apostasy from the January dream seeped into its own generation then onto ours. Not because January was not real, God forbid, nor because the January generation is now captive to its own mythic moment, but because engaging with it was, and remains, one of the most demanding tasks.

That generation was traumatized after creating a miracle, after seeing that a unified human line could be stronger than iron and fire in one moment, and in another be crushed by an armored vehicle or a bullet.

Neither they, nor we, discovered the correct balance in the equation. What makes the line stronger than bullets at one moment, and weaker at another?

It is no surprise what befell them, after they witnessed Egyptians burned alive in a public square, others suffocating to death inside a police van, or being snatched from their homes at dawn—only for media megaphones and newspapers to come out the next day with praise for the one who did all this: the great savior.

No wonder this generation was traumatized—traumatized to the point of seizures—whenever a police car passes by.

The lost lessons of the Spring

Perhaps it is time for the January generation to step aside—not as a defeated generation, despite its defeat, but as one that played its role and paid the price. We are now sharing in paying the remainder of the bill, whose taxes still extend to today.

The January generation must now write, narrate, and admit their mistakes—not to flog themselves but to lay for those who come after firmer grounds. They must offer our generation a theory, or lessons we can draw from, or shelter behind, when the third party’s bullets come at us from where we least expect them.

In truth, January will not return as we once knew it. Change is inevitable, and straw continues to pile on the camel’s back—each coming straw could be the breaking point.

If we possess a theory, or extract a lesson from January’s lost lessons, perhaps we can direct the raging flood toward those who deserve it, without devouring everything in our path. Let every corrupt figure—an enemy of the revolution and of the country’s liberation—take heed, whether from the current regime, the former one, or from the classmates of class 3B.