The meek shall inherit - Egypt on the brink of Tunisia style revolution

On January 25, 2011 -- a national holiday honoring the police -- tens of thousands of Egyptians did something their parents had never dared: they marched on the police. The "Day of Rage," organized largely over Facebook and Twitter by young activists, filled Tahrir Square in Cairo and spilled into Alexandria, Suez, Mansoura, and cities across the country.

The demands were the ones no one had been allowed to voice for three decades: Hosni Mubarak must go, the emergency law must end, and a regime built on low wages, high prices, and police brutality had to answer for itself. Mubarak had ruled since 1981 -- nearly thirty years -- under a permanent state of emergency that banned public gatherings and let security forces detain citizens at will.

Tunisia was the spark. Eleven days earlier, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had fled Tunis after 23 years in power, and Egyptians watched it happen live. If Tunisians could do it, the logic went, why not Egyptians?

The regime answered the way it knew how. Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets; protesters in Suez fought back with stones. By the end of the second day, several protesters were dead in Suez, and the government had begun throttling the internet. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition bloc, initially kept its distance from the protests -- a sign of how much this uprising belonged to the young and the unaffiliated rather than the old opposition.

What happened next -- eighteen days that ended with Mubarak's resignation on February 11 -- is history. But on January 26, none of that was certain. What was certain was that the fear barrier had cracked: Egyptians had discovered, in a single day, that they could fill the squares and the regime could not empty them.