When Democracy Weakens - NYTimes.com

Bob Herbert - the New York Times columnist - hasn't gotten the message that it is unfashionable to be concerned about the poor in what used to be called "the ghetto" but now doesn't get called anything at all.  What caught my eye was his mention of my late teacher - Howard Zinn of Boston University:

The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

 I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”

I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.

When Democracy Weakens - NYTimes.com