Trail of morning thoughts

Most (well, all) of my education has encouraged me to distance myself from nationalism. I have always deconstructed it, taken it apart into the symbols and the language used to evoke emotion, to create and highlight feelings of belonging to a group of people far too large to ever be understood with any accuracy. Even at times when I was moved by a song or a speech, I was very consciously aware of it, and immediately began to separate my mind from it. I saw nationalism as some kind of drug, one which suspended clear thought...more importantly, it seemed to me like those under its sway had been fooled by some larger strategist, some institution which had perfected the art of propaganda and manipulation....

You would expect me to begin to write about how all this has changed, how I now see the importance of overwhelming passion for one's nation....no. I still think that our feelings towards our communities are far too easily manipulated. We are social, we want to be social...and we know this. Every political party, opposition group, and revolutionary has known this, and has attempted to use it to their advantage. Look at Egypt. Opposition groups use chants which hearken "glorious" revolutions (revolutions which were instituted in the public mind as "glorious" by the same regime against which today's chants are hurled). Names of Egyptians, songs, references to places and to events which are all too symbolic, evocative of some distant dream which we keep being told we are heading towards. That dream is there in the social studies books used in the public education sysytem, in the posters propagating the NDP's attempt at a new image, in every piece of public policy engineered by or for Egypt. And when that dream is evoked in the context of opposition, when we are confronted by it while simultaneosly presenting the failures and brutalities of our government, the result is all the more violently emotional.