The Hill News

I first traveled to Cairo in 2001, just two months before the towers fell. I remember contrasting the feeling of being in Egypt with that of being in the U.S. In the U.S., anything â€" education, career, love, fame â€"seemed possible. In Egypt, the people, the country itself, seemed resigned, like there was nothing to look forward to. In a café near Tahrir Square, I drank coffee with two middle-class, university-educated, unemployed young men, who told me that there was nothing for them in Egypt. Nothing.

Almost ten years later, I am living in the region and watching it erupt with something that has, for too long, been absent: possibility.  

While this moment is undeniably an Arab moment, in which the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and across the Arab world are contemplating what they want their societies to be, it is also a moment of reckoning with the United States. 

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