...in which I don't talk about Italy at all.

This is off topic, but I feel the need to say it anyway.

When I got home from class today, there were unsubstantiated reports that Gaddafi had been killed. Then I took a nap. I woke up to find that story confirmed and all over the internet, and I have three brief things to say about it. I'm no current events/world politics expert by any means, so forgive me my naïveté.

First, I think it's important that this was done by the Libyan people themselves. They started the uprising, they installed their own interim government, and they killed their tyrant, similar to the situation in Egypt and the other nations involved in the Arab Spring revolts. Iraq is a great counterexample; the United States had it's nose in all of Iraq's business, which is why, in my opinion, the situation has been so prolonged and messy. It harkens back to decolonialization problems in Africa: when and how does a nation leave another?  I just feel that it is not the place of the US, or any powerful Western nation, to claim to understand the sentiments of and be able to aid the changes happening in the Arab world. So props to the Libyans who fought for their own freedom in their own country.

Second, I feel like the world is about to boil over. There have been so many protests and big movements of late. I could just be more attuned to them now than in the past because I'm older and more aware of world news, but something powerful seems to be happening. From immigration marches in the US, to the Arab Spring movements, to the Global Occupy movement, it really feels like someone has lit a fire under everyone's asses, and it's kind of exciting in a watch-from-my-couch sort of way.

Lastly, being the history nerd that I am, I'm intrigued by the label that has been put on this movement, the "Arab Spring". I can't help but be interested in the fact that the next generation will be memorizing that term for their world history classes. It blows my mind a little bit. It also makes me think about the history I study. For example, "Renaissance", renascimento, these are 18th century labels put on an era by a historian named Jacob Burkhardt. And we learn about what was called the Great War while it was happening as the First World War. So how do we label things to study them? Is it fair to think about things in terms of late labels given them by historians? And how does this work when Western news outlets label movements in the Arab world? How can we conceptualize the events happening in Libya, both as they relate to us as the so-called Arab Spring, and as they are being experienced by the Libyans, who, as far as I can guess, are not thinking about this movement in those terms? Something I just can't not think about.