Dennis Hollingsworth

Libertad

I'm collecting today's image of freedom:

This one, from Lebanon. How exciting this all is! Memories of 1989's fall of the Berlin Wall come to mind, mine and others.

This, from Iraq recently. When I first saw this, I thought it was commercially manufactured... but it was spontaneous.

I'm looking around for Afganistan's image. And I look forward to a few more to come. I think women are the critical factor in this story, the beginning of the end of atavistic patriarchy (the kind that leads to honor killings, for example).

The NYTimes' Editorial Board is getting on Freedom's side of history:

Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.

(Ahem) Success has a new father.