Yes, books are destroying America's girls. (Don't get me wrong, I'm all into girls learning to make things! It's just... let's say, complicated. Since the public schools already funnel students into "white collar" and "worker" channels at an early age.) In other news, the story of how the State Department's summer cultural exchange program dumped visiting college students—many of whom are enrolled in "medical and engineering graduate schools"—into harsh assembly-line jobs at a Hershey's plant is hilarious: "In a meeting at the plant last week, which a student recorded on a mobile phone, a manager advised them they could be fired and the council might send them back home if they engaged in a protest." Welcome! Now you've got a through education in USA! USA! I think we can find a solution here. Just shove the girls in Hershey's camps and have the foreigners make all our lampshades.

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On Thursday night, the eve of the largest gatherings calling for Mubarak's resignation yet, a friend of Dylan's named Will was having a party. Dylan retreated to a bedroom with his best mates, Matthew Scarvie, also 19 and from New Mexico, and Gunnar Dancer, a 20-year old from Minnesota. It was very early on Friday morning when they made it back to a shared apartment they rented—a block from Tahrir Square, ground zero for the protests. The friends called the apartment "The Aviary," because of the birds they kept on the balcony. "They're probably dead now," Gunnar said.

They woke up late and bleary in the morning, the day protesters were calling the Friday of Anger. It was after 11 a.m., and they walked to a breakfast place called Kazaz, where for less than two dollars you could order an omelet, ful, falafel, tea and bread. During the meal, uniformed police entered the restaurant; they glowered at customers and searched the bathrooms. Just before 1 p.m., the boys saw green rugs unrolled and people kneeling in prayer. Dylan said there was a sense of anticipation in the air.

They stopped to get ice cream, and were picking out flavors when workers begin to pull the shutters. "Hurry, hurry," said the ice cream shop owner. Outside, the boys sat on a curb licking their cones when an older man began to speak. They were on the edge of the vast square, where crowds were growing, and they strained to hear over sirens. Then police vans began screeching through the crowd. At one point, an officer in a riot helmet emerged from a van, and—thud, thud, thud—tear gas exploded. From the roofs of nearby buildings, people began dropping bottles of water, oranges, torn-up cloth for gas masks and onions to staunch the tears.

The crowd was like a school of fish, dodging a shark, they said, rushing in waves from danger. Gunnar took shelter in a kiosk. A percussion grenade boomed, knocking over an older lady. The alleys, where the air did not move, were choked with tear gas. "That's the worst gas I've ever seen," Gunnar said, like a grizzled veteran. "If you opened your eyes, they would burn."

Through the dense fog, Gunnar saw a lone old man stand in the middle of a deserted street, berating a fearsome wall of police. Then the helmeted officers began charging, firing a hail of bullets. Gunnar dove behind a car. His pants split. He couldn't tell if the police were firing high or if the old man had been hit. He was a block from his apartment, but he couldn't get home.

He ducked into a shop, where eight people were hiding among the safety of bolts of cloth. "Take those off," said the shop owner, a tailor, pointing to Gunnar's pants. "I'll sew them for you."

At last, all the boys made it back to the apartment, where they turned on the TV. Across the street, they could see an old man dropping stones on the heads of police. The police thought the volleys were coming from a nearby parking lot. From their balcony, they watched a stream of injured people, out of breath, red-faced, in tears.

It got dark. The headquarters of the ruling party was on fire. You could hear gunfire and explosions. The college students were learning to distinguish between rubber bullets, live ammunition, the thud of tear gas canisters, percussion grenades and Molotov cocktails.

To explain the situation, Dylan gestured at my kitchen table. My arm was the museum. The square was my notebook, and the teapot was the government building. He seemed shocked to be describing a neighborhood he'd grown to love, a place that had become a war zone. "I've seen tanks at museums," Dylan said. "But these tanks were standing in the city I live in."

Saturday morning, destruction was everywhere. Windows had been knocked out. Businesses were shut and damaged; cars were burning on the street. The police were gone. At 10 a.m., the phones came back on, and everyone called their parents. They didn't have much credit on their phones, so the conversations were brief.

I asked what they told their parents. "You don't exactly tell everything you did to your mom," he said. "We're college kids; it's understood."

* * *

Sunday was the day classes were supposed to start. "It sort of felt like a snow day," Dylan said. "Except we were barricaded by the Egyptian Army." They looked out the window and saw crowds of guys with metal pipes. There was some sort of altercation. A guy swung a machete wildly, and the crowd convulsed in anger.

Overhead, helicopters circled. Dylan said Syracuse called, ordering him to join the U.S. government evacuation, but he didn't want to get on a plane bound for some random European capital. Matthew was in a similar situation. His school—Arizona State University—had decided to cancel the Cairo program. His funding would be cut, and dependent on student aid, he couldn't afford to stay on his own dime. Gunnar, meanwhile, was left behind—his university seemed to have forgotten about him. Talking to his mom, a sonic boom exploded. "What was that?" his mother said. "Oh, it's just the fighter jets," he told her. They ate a lot of pasta.

On Tuesday morning, at last they decided as a group they would leave Cairo. The cab ride to campus took them through a city under siege. When they arrived, two buses were waiting to take students to the airport. At this point, the departures were voluntary—classes had technically been rescheduled for February 13. At the VIP terminal, they were met by U.S. officials wearing Homeland Security IDs on lanyards. After sitting on the tarmac for two hours, a fellow student several rows back got a call from a friend whose apartment was being overrun; he was restrained from returning.

On the plane were also tourists and State Department personnel, including a young embassy family with a three-month old baby. Waiting to take off, they said you could see planes from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Korea, alongside sleek private jets. Even Iraq was evacuating its citizens.

The guys arrived in Istanbul to an empty hallway. On the other side of immigration sat a lone card table draped with an American flag. Several women with clipboards milled around, looking confused. They had four-page forms—agreements to repay the U.S. government within 90 days for the cost of the flight. How much was the flight? None of the women knew the answer, and so the boys refused to sign. On the table were packets of crackers. At duty free, they bought Lucky Strike cigarettes.

* * *

"It didn't feel abnormal," Matthew said, talking about the cab ride from the airport to the center of Istanbul. "It felt like a quick vacation," Gunnar said. It was amazing, Dylan said, to be somewhere clean, where people drove normally. "They have pizza here," Gunnar said, and grinned.

Gunnar told me he'd be heading to Minnesota. Matthew said he would return to New Mexico. Dylan said he hoped to resume studies, perhaps in Beirut. He told me about trying to talk to his mom, but getting interrupted when his sister came home from school. "I'm trying to talk about my life, this revolution, and my sister is trying to tell my mom she got 100 on an English exam," he said. "That's important, but I'm in a war zone."

So far, the U.S. government has evacuated several thousand American citizens from Egypt. Home was, of course, where most of the Americans were always headed after their time abroad. For them—as much as for any outsider—a place like Egypt is a blip on an otherwise overwhelmingly American radar.

Given that, how much, if at all, will the events unfolding at Tahrir Square remain a part of our lives? For what it was worth, Dylan, Gunnar, and Matthew seemed to offer a difficult answer.

Imagining talking to his friends for the first time, Dylan said he'd tell them about freedom, that he'd seen what real revolution looked like. "Like the American revolution?" Much better, Dylan assured me: "This was more real." But I wondered if his friends would understand.

"It's all still so fresh," Gunnar said. "But I'm really nervous about two weeks from now."

And what about the Egyptians? We sat in silence.

Matthew shook his head, perhaps sensing the difficulty of what was to come. "Maybe we never should have gone out," he said, as if they could still reconsider their decision to leave the apartment. "I think we may have been too casual about all this," he said.

Nathan Deuel is a writer who lives in Turkey and in Iraq, where his wife is the NPR correspondent based in Baghdad. When he quit his last real media job — at Rolling Stone — he packed a bag and walked from New York to New Orleans. This is his first piece for The Awl but his other writing can be found here.

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The media refers to both the November 10th and November 24th demonstrations as "riots." ("As Students Rampage...," headlined the Mirror last week.) So what is becoming lost is what the November 10th demonstration was like for the 30,000 to 50,000 peaceful protesters who flooded the streets outside Parliament in defense of higher education.

My protest experience began at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. in a University of Sussex campus bar. It was serving breakfast early for the occasion. The warm-enough eggs and triangular slabs of hash browns were just one aspect of the institutional support for the demonstration—professors were encouraged to reschedule lectures to allow attendance, and assignment due dates were pushed back a day. The Sussex Student Union had found common cause with an administration seemingly eager to regain students' good will and stave off government cuts.

In a burst of journalistic arrogance I approached a student sitting intent over his eggs and toast and asked if he'd mind answering some questions. He said that he didn't mind, his name was Bart, and he was Dutch, in that order; when asked why he was demonstrating for another country's education system, he replied that it was a matter of social responsibility—and a misconception on the state's part of what education is: “Basically, you have to pay for your own education because you are the only one profiting from it. And that's just not true.” Common benefit should equal common cost—as morally clear a belief as any, and one directly contradicted by the reasoning of the Browne education review and David Cameron's governing coalition.

The Browne review is the polarizing document from David Cameron's government—which was actually commissioned by Gordon Brown on the way out—in order to reduce Britain's growing national deficits. You may read it here. The summary explains that Lord Browne's "recommendations present a radical plan to shake up higher education in England and a charter for choice for students." The review is now a component of Cameron's deficit reduction scheme which contains, among various policy suggestions, cuts to social programs, welfare, government payrolls and defense. The most controversial recommendations so far—at least the only ones to inspire tens of thousands to wave signs and yell slogans from the National Gallery to Millibank—are the ones to do with the Browne report. Britain's higher education system, a bedrock of the welfare state since the 1962 Education Act mandated free university for all, has been steadily eroded since Tony Blair's Labour administration instituted fees in 1998.

Since then, fee limits increased from £1500 to £3000, as the government tried to shift the funding of universities from grants to tuition. The Browne review would raise that limit to £9,000, as well as eliminating all government funds for the humanities. This has sparked what can only be labeled a shitstorm among students, many of whom voted for Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats only to see the party abandon their anti-fees pledge upon forming a coalition with the Conservatives.

Given that us American college students—I am an exchange student—regularly face tuitions of up to $50,000 each year to go to school, the outrage here can have a surreal tinge to it. Then again, we expect our schools to treat us like consumers. In fact, the new buzzword in higher education has administrators calling students "customers."

I filed into line after breakfast and received a recycled wristband (it was labeled “Sussex Fresher's Pub Crawl”) to gain access to the coach. The bus filled up quickly and left. Students talked animatedly, hands around cardboard cups of coffee, or leaned their heads against windows and tried to sleep. A tall, pale kid in a hoodie walked the length of the double decker, hawking copies of Socialist Worker; a group of three unnaturally peppy girls carried a large tupperware container of flapjacks, selling them for some cause or another. Luke, a first year student with the red of a Remembrance Day poppy on his blazer, sat next to me. For him, the demonstration was a personal as well as political matter—while he would be out of university before the fees came into effect, his younger brother would have to face the choice of heavy debt or lack of education.

The drive stretched north through miles of English suburbia and countryside. The low November sun bathed the coach and formed shifting, fractal shadows against the encroaching treeline. A black, tapered structure appeared out of the passing fields—a World War II monument, small wooden crosses and poppies arranged next to it in rows. The traffic grew torturous as we passed through the outskirts of London—Coulsdon, Norbury, and Streatham crawling by in repetitious streets of barber shops, Halal restaurants, convenience stores, and one incongruous Papa Johns. Repurposed factories that were now shops littered side streets, defunct smokestacks angled up to the cold blue sky. A banner outside the Stockwell underground station memorialized Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man shot dead in 2005 by police who believed him to be a terrorist responsible for the recent London tube bombings.

We eventually made it into London proper, disembarked at the Aldwych Theater, and began to walk to the London School of Economics. Along the way I talked to students. Ellen, a Sussex undergraduate, said that she was marching for her younger sister, while Adam, a student in a pseudo-military getup carrying a sign over his shoulder, was at his first major protest. The commonalities were striking—a lack of major political experience, a feeling of betrayal on the part of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, and a sense of moral outrage over the government's abdication of social responsibility.

We crossed the Thames, our numbers growing as demonstrators converged on the rally point. The crowd was vocal throughout, shouting, singing, generally making a high spirited racket. The chants ranged from the traditional—“No ifs, no buts, no education cuts,” a classic of iambic outrage—to the hilariously blunt. Class was a clear dividing point. Shouts of “David Cameron, go back to Eton” were greeted with raucous cheers. Easily the best, however, was a tuneful chant set to “Oh My Darling, Clementine”:

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire
Put the Tories on the top
Put the Liberals in the middle
And we'll burn the fucking lot.

In retrospect, that reads as some very on the nose foreshadowing for what was to come at Tory headquarters. At the time, however, I chalked it up to an endearing pyromaniac tendency in British politics, coming as it did just five days after the fireworks and effigies of Guy Fawkes Day.

We crowded into a wide alley between the brick and concrete buildings of the London School of Economics, the crowd filing in behind us. Signs dangled from ceilings and windows; a huge blue and green banner saying “Freeze the Fees” was strung from the window of a high rise directly in front of the rally. LSE students and lecturers delivered a series of short, punchy speeches, hitting notes of anger, populism and social justice. A professor shouted his deep sandpaper brogue into a microphone, attacking the “fat cats” who have “wrecked our society,” asking the crowd if any of them were going to go work for Goldman Sachs (he was met with a chorus of boos). “We will not stand idly by while politicians sell our education to the highest bidder,” said one student representative during an impassioned plea for public education and the humanities. The crowd was young and thoroughly multi-ethnic; most carried backpacks. Many took the opportunity to roll cigarettes while standing still.

Then the speeches were over, and with a collective roar the demonstration began its march to Parliament. One student lit a red sparkler and ran through the crowd, trailing smoke and embers behind him. The march grew in size as more protesters streamed in from side streets and were greeted with cheers. With surprising quickness the demonstration's numbers grew from the thousands to the tens of thousands. Bemused tourists waited endlessly to cross the street as we cut through Trafalgar Square; cars and trucks that honked in solidarity received roars of approval. Bursts of music mixed with the general exuberant volume of the students. A drumline beat a rhythm outside Pizza Express. A brass band reading sheet music taped to each others' backs played John Philip Sousa's "The Liberty Bell" march—more commonly known as the Monty Python theme song. An enterprising street vender sold vuvuzelas to the walking masses.

As the demonstration made its ponderous way down Whitehall, I spoke with several protesters about their reasons for demonstrating. Rob, a student new to political action, characterized the proposed fee raises as “just stupid, really.” Trying to draw out a slightly more trenchant analysis of the situation, I asked who he had voted for in the last election and hit the sore spot. Rob had voted Lib Dem, and thought it was “horrific how that they've turned against us and fucked everything up.”

Polly, a mother of one future and two current university students, was demonstrating with a sign reading “Angry Mums against Higher Uni Fees.” While there was no visible evidence of widespread maternal radicalism, she assured me that there were many like her out there. A Labour voter, she nonetheless expressed outrage at the Liberal betrayal and thought that Nick Clegg should do the decent thing and step down.

And I met Sam, a long-haired Goldsmiths student, standing on the balustrade outside Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs building. He had voted Green, and felt vindicated. “I was never going to vote Lib Dems,” he said. “It was obvious from the beginning that they were between a rock and hard place, between Labour and Conservatives, and they're both bullshit. To be fair to them, that's what they do. They're in Parliament.”

The march slowed to a crawl as police held open half the road. After twenty minutes of excessively slow movement, I cut through a traffic jam and jogged down the sidewalk looking for a better view. After climbing on a guard rail, I discovered that the demo had grown staggeringly huge—media estimates placed the top number at around 50,000, but all I knew then was that Whitehall was shoulder to shoulder with students from Trafalgar Square down to Parliament. Finally the rally picked up speed again; the streets were full as it reached its endpoint, thousands upon thousands surrounding Parliament, a student with a camera hanging one-armed off the Westminster station underground sign. There were drums and the constant din of human voices, rising to frantic pitch after each round of cheers or in response to anything, really. A circling news helicopter drew excited mass yells each time it passed over the demonstration. Until then, the protest had seen very limited police presence and, according to one officer I spoke to, had been completely peaceful.

As we walked past Parliament, a woman with a megaphone informed us that the official demonstration was over. Word started to spread of a thoroughly unofficial occupation of Tory headquarters that was taking place a few blocks down the street. That building was a scene of sublimated chaos. A crowd of demonstrators stood on the street outside, steadfastly ignoring pink-vested officials urging them to move along. Inside the semi-circular courtyard, hundreds of students were jammed together as smoke rose from an improvised bonfire and drum-and-bass blasted out of speakers from a staircase. Up on the roof, several occupiers pumped their fists and waved black and red flags to yells of solidarity from the crowd. A University of Leeds banner was hung from the top of the facade to cheers.

The crowd was packed thick and I couldn't see much, so I jumped a guardrail onto a more sparsely populated stairwell. The entire front window had been smashed; the glass was a spiderweb of cracks, with shards scattered on the walkway leading to the entrance. A line of police officers, ludicrously outnumbered, formed a barricade around the doorway as a spontaneous mosh pit formed fewer than twenty feet from them. A line of riot police carrying batons and plexiglass shields tried to push their way to the door; they retreated after being pelted with sticks from signs and shoved back. A group of demonstrators broke a boom barrier and began to stream around the back of the building, where a few police officers stood guard over Tory headquarters' parking garage.

A few students were starting another fire on the outskirts of the courtyard, using broken signs and copies of the Socialist Worker for kindling. I walked towards Whitehall. I saw a small group of students blockading a side street, where police reinforcements stood uncertainly and then left. Tom, a protester in a black knit cap carrying a megaphone, said that they'd been blocking the route for around fifteen minutes, and generally demonstrating in the area for a couple of hours. I asked him what he thought about the police retreat: “At the moment the police force here are spread fairly thin," he said. "They seem to be jumping to different areas of the vicinity, so I imagine they'll be coming back here as soon as more people start throwing things again.”

If that situation reads like the adolescent fantasy of a kid who just bought his first Dead Kennedys album and feels like it really means something, well, it kind of was. Youths waving banners from the top of a damaged government building, seemingly immune to the police or the vagaries of any authority—it was powerful, and I did get swept up in the mass exhilaration. The slightest moment's reflection, however, reveals the short sightedness of the violence. For instance, the political consequences to a movement that needs mainstream support to affect national policy, or say, the stupidly dangerous decision to throw a fire extinguisher out an office window with hundreds of people standing below.

The occupation cannot be viewed as defining the protest as whole, or as being separate from it. Given that the two most recent mass demonstrations in the United States were run by a TV comedian and a reactionary demagogue, also from TV, the events of November 10th deserve our respect. They displayed extremity in the form of an articulate, outraged, passionate response to government abandonment of education that drew tens of thousands of committed young people off the Internet, out of the schools and into the streets.

Correction: This post has been updated in one paragraph to properly explain the Browne Review.

Dan Glaun is a UMass undergrad and thinks you're pretty cool. He is currently unemployed, but prefers the term 'freelancer.' He can be reached at dgg20 [AT] sussex.ac.uk.

Photo by Andrew Moss from Flickr.

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