It was as though everybody had been locked in solitary in a small little dark box, you know, and told to be afraid of everything else and sort of rattled from time to time. And you’d opened the box and stepped out and found that everything was great. You know, there was light. There were other people.
And what happened was that almost overnight a civic space was created in Tahrir Square that was the ideal space, that one imagined, that everybody imagined how the country should be or how any country should be. People were kind of like really careful of each other. People were overly courteous. People were picking up rubbish. People were bringing things to offer. It very soon became that you didn’t go to Tahrir without something to offer, whether it was cookies, whether it was your effort, whether it was water, whether it was medicines for the field hospitals. In other words, everybody was finding the best in themselves and putting it forward. And that was just incredible.
