MADE IN THE USA

By Aurora Ellis - December 22, 2011

Cairo - Americans often take pride when they see a product they purchase or sell is "Made in the USA."  But do they have as much pride when they see that the tear gas canisters and the rubber bullets ripping through the torsos and limbs of the youth in Egypt also say “Made in the USA?”

This is not an article defaming the U.S. administration on imagined grievances from a third world country anymore than the U.S.A.-labeled canister was imagined by those who faced them in Tahrir Square on Sunday.

These, in fact, are the labels that Egyptian men and women see as they carry the limp bodies of their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters from the debris-cluttered ground to meager makeshift hospitals.

Currently, the American-made tear gas and rubber bullets used against protestors is a running theme throughout Egyptian social networking sites and rightly so. Twitterfeeds claim that 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile (CS) teargas produced in America is being used against protestors and Twitter-users have many pictures of the empty canisters to back the allegation.

CS tear gas is well-known chemical agent used against pro-democracy protestors throughout the world. The tear gas is a classified and used as a chemical weapon. The chemical agent can cause fainting, intense vomiting, burning sensation in the eye and mouth and has been implicated in significant long term poisoning as well.

It is more than likely that the tear gas canister that severed and killed a young Egyptian teenager yesterday was a part of the arsenal bestowed to the Egyptian military from the United States military aid it has received annually since 1979. The Egyptian military receives the highest U.S. financial support after Israel,  a military the U.S. government is fully aware is controlled by a corrupt and oppressive regime.

Coming from Tahrir it is apparent that the Egyptian people are at war. They are at war with brutality of a military state, they are at war with a global economic system that protects their forcible impoverishment and they are at war with the violence manufactured by more powerful nations and exported to their oppressors.

And I assure you, Egyptians are far from the nameless foreigners that appear in our television screens for the lackluster two and half minute segments we get in our “World News” broadcasts. They are teachers, dancers, artists, mechanics, doormen, and students.  They are people who speak three or four languages with ease and whose brilliance is stymied but never dimmed by the systematic political, economic and social suppression they face.

It is imperative U.S. citizens demand that these weapons are not used against any protestors ever, whether abroad or at home. We can and should not wait for the empty condemnations of our government to actively denounce these atrocities because the government that has no problem exporting these chemicals of violence abroad will have no problem deploying them at home as the protestors in Occupy Oakland discovered just weeks ago. We should take issue with this on the streets and the ballot.

The pride of Americans should not come from their historical capitalist and jingoist drive for mass production and the desire to see our “brand” everywhere but for an undying effort to uplift humanity, a humanity which is not defined merely on nationalistic, linguistic or politically-made geographical lines but is predicated on our ties to people as fellow human beings who deserve to live in a just world.

We in Cairo urge you to step out your door and take to the streets because the fight of the Egyptian people is a global fight and the Egyptian struggle, humanity’s struggle. There is only so long we can feign innocence, act uninvolved, and ignore the cries of others before the blood that run the streets of Cairo, or Iraq or Somalia or Sudan come to haunt us.

As American orator and activist Sister Soulja once told a crowded congregation, “we have to be concerned about others because their pain and suffering whatever it might be will come to visit you, whether you pay attention or not it will knock on your door and if you ignore it for too long it will rob you of what you covet of what you feel most precious about.”