On the day the school year ended, I took my 9-year-old son to the beach. The sea was unusually rough for this otherwise warm summer. The waves were high and a red flag fluttered over the lifeguard’s booth, warning bathers to be especially careful.

“If you see a big wave, get under it,” I cautioned my son. “Let it pass over you. Don’t confront it. Don’t let it hit you, because that could be dangerous.” I never took my eyes off him for a moment in the choppy water. Whenever a huge wave threatened to roll over us and knock us down, we both dove under it and made our way through the stream of water that seethed and foamed above our heads like a raging storm.

I bring this up as an analogy as I watch all the incredible images coming in from Egypt’s cities, especially Cairo. A wave of millions of protesters is pouring into Tahrir Square again. There isn’t a historian or Middle East scholar in the world — or a politician or general, for that matter — who can say what tomorrow will bring and where Egypt is headed in the near or distant future. Who could even have imagined that just one year after the Muslim Brotherhood’s historic victory at the polls and the establishment of democracy after decades of autocratic rule, Tahrir Square would fill up again with millions of demonstrators demanding to repeat their great achievement, the toppling of the regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, or that they would be doing it this time with even greater force? 

Local press photographers stationed on the rooftops surrounding Tahrir Square are capturing once-in-a-lifetime images. I doubt there is anyone in the West, or in the East for that matter, who can imagine what that vast human wave looks like, sounds like, feels like as they are trying to change the very nature and character of Egypt, and, actually, that of the entire Middle East.