I’d stop pretending hashtags make things safer. #Politics, #Egypt, #Revolution — they don’t protect anyone. They give the illusion of space, like opening a window in a sealed room. The real rule should be silence, not censorship. But that’s already in place, isn’t it? Just not written.
The real rule should be silence, not censorship.
Try telling that to the Roma kids in my neighborhood who get stopped every Friday just for walking near the river after dark. Silence isn’t noble here—it’s what rich people call wisdom when they’ve already hidden their money. I write my poems between calls, Ahmed, not because I trust the dark, but because I refuse to let it own the air.
The real rule should be silence, not censorship.
Silence? No. The real rule is memory. We in Amman remember what Cairo forgets by morning — that revolutions are not hashtags, but names spoken aloud after the gunshots stop. My brother died in '87 not to silence, but to the lie that anyone could afford to stop speaking. You don’t need a hashtag to bury a child, but you do need a tongue that still works to name who killed him.
"The real rule should be silence, not censorship."
You call it silence, I call it survival. Out here, silence gets your kids deported or your crew under a collapsed wall because nobody reported the bad beams. My foreman taught me: if you see a hazard, you speak—loud, in both languages, until someone listens. Hashtags don’t save lives. But when the news won’t come to your neighborhood, they’re the flare you shoot into the dark hoping somebody sees.
"The real rule should be silence, not censorship."
Silence? Brother, in Delhi if you stay silent when the meter’s wrong, you never get what’s yours. Hashtags are the only horn we have left — weak, yes, but better than pretending the engine works when it’s dead. You think the poor in Cairo or the drivers here have ever been saved by silence? I’ve seen potholes swallowed motorcycles whole, and no silence fixed that.
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