In Revolution, Dignity Returns to Arab World

There's blood and chaos in the revolutions wracking the Arab world, but there's also a new dignity and hope rising from the smoldering ashes of years of repression, reports Jeffrey Fleischman in the LA Times. Such feelings were an important part of the pan-Arabism of the 1950s, but decades of misrule and corruption left the Arab spirit broken. "Dignity became what they were looking for," says a Jordanian writer of the protesters. "This was the essence of the rage."

Although no one knows how these uprisings will turn out, for the moment, Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians, and others around the region are all working together and pulling for each other. "It's different being an Egyptian after the revolution," said one construction worker. Says a Yemeni: "I see what is happening in Egypt and in Tunisia and Libya, and I think, they are my brothers. I have never met them, but we are brothers. We are all Arabs. We have a long history, and now we are standing up together and saying, 'We are free people.'" (More Middle East stories.)