Time & Perspective Quote by Hosni Mubarak

The line reads like a thank-you note, but it’s really a pressure valve. Mubarak flatters “a symbolic generation” not to empower it, but to domesticate it: you are brave, you are the future, you are already winning. The rhetoric is soft by design. “Grateful” and “proud” recast a confrontation with power as an intergenerational handshake, a move that tries to shrink politics into family dynamics where dissent becomes a phase you outgrow once the father figure nods approvingly.

The most revealing word is “symbolic.” It praises the young not for concrete demands but for their image value, turning a mass movement into a poster. “Calling for change to the better” is equally frictionless: change, yes; specifics, no. In moments of uprising, vagueness is a tactic. It offers the sensation of being heard without granting a lever that could actually move the state.

The closing clause, “making the future,” is the line’s sleight of hand. It sounds like a concession of agency, yet it subtly relocates responsibility. If the future is theirs to “make,” then instability, economic pain, and the messiness of transition can be pre-assigned to them too. It’s an attempted pivot from accountability to mentorship: the regime as benevolent elder, the protesters as gifted children.

In the context of late-stage authoritarianism, that’s not empathy; it’s narrative control. The goal is to reframe a crisis of legitimacy as a celebratory generational story, where the leader can survive by applauding the crowd that wants him gone.