When Revolutions Age: A Lament
When Revolutions Age: Libya, Longing, and the Irony of Liberation
Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™
March 1, 2026
Introduction
There is a peculiar grief that arrives after the fireworks of political jubilation have cooled: a grief that tastes of dust, of empty classrooms, of refrigerators that hum with absence. This essay approaches that grief as a scholar who keeps a soft spot for the anecdotal, as a humanist who refuses to reduce suffering to statistics, and as a wry observer who recognizes that irony is often the last luxury left to those who survive upheaval. I take as my starting point a terse, anguished claim: that the children of Libyans who once celebrated the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi now face hunger and interrupted education; that many Muslims feel this to be among the saddest chapters in recent memory; and that the apparent impotence of economically and militarily strong Muslim-majority states in the face of global power dynamics compounds the sense of abandonment. I will write with academic care, humane attention, esoteric detours, and a pinch of humor that is more rueful than celebratory. Finally, I will disconfirm the alternative—namely, the comforting narrative that overthrowing a tyrant necessarily yields immediate and unequivocal improvement—by showing why that alternative is both seductive and insufficient.
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Libya as Parable and Particular
Libya, in the popular imagination, became a parable of the Arab Spring’s most vexed promise: the idea that removing a single autocrat would set in motion a cascade of democratic renewal. The reality was messier. The fall of a centralized, if brutal, regime unmoored institutions, fractured patronage networks, and opened space for competing militias and foreign interventions. The children born into the immediate aftermath inherited not only the memory of jubilation but also the administrative vacuum that makes schooling irregular, health systems fragile, and markets volatile. To say this is not to moralize about the past; it is to register the arithmetic of state capacity: when the machinery of governance is dismantled without a reliable replacement, the most vulnerable—children, the elderly, those on the margins—bear the brunt.
There is a human story behind every statistic. A teacher who once celebrated the end of censorship now struggles to keep a classroom open because salaries are delayed. A parent who danced in the streets at the sight of toppled statues now calculates whether to sell a family heirloom to pay for a child’s textbooks. These are not metaphors; they are the quotidian arithmetic of survival. The tragedy is not that liberation was sought—liberation is a moral good—but that the transition was neither planned nor protected in ways that could have mitigated the immediate human cost.
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The Irony of Plenty and the Silence of Power
The lament that “we have so many Muslims and such economically and militarily strong countries but none are standing up” is at once a moral indictment and a geopolitical observation. It is tempting to read this as a failure of solidarity, a moral lapse among states that share religious identity. Yet geopolitics rarely bows to the logic of shared faith. States act according to interests, alliances, and domestic constraints. The irony is that religious solidarity, which can be a powerful mobilizing force in civil society, is often subordinated to the calculus of statecraft.
There is also an internal irony: countries that might be expected to intervene on humanitarian grounds are themselves navigating complex domestic politics, economic dependencies, and strategic calculations. The result is a chorus of silence or selective engagement that fuels the sense of abandonment. This is not merely a failure of will; it is a structural feature of a world where power is unevenly distributed and moral claims compete with material interests. The humor here is bitter: imagine a neighborhood where everyone agrees a house is on fire, yet each homeowner waits for the other to call the fire brigade because the water bill is due next week.
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Anecdote, Erudition, and the Esoteric Thread
Permit an anecdote that is both small and telling. Years ago, in a university seminar, a student from a conflict-affected country described how her grandmother would recite a poem about patience whenever the electricity failed. The poem was not a resignation; it was a ritual of endurance that named suffering without naturalizing it. That grandmother’s poem is the kind of cultural ballast that communities use to survive the long, grinding aftermath of political rupture. It is also a reminder that history is not only made by generals and diplomats but by those who keep the lights on, literally and metaphorically.
From an erudite vantage, one might invoke Tocqueville’s caution about revolutions: that the removal of a despot does not automatically produce the institutions that sustain liberty. Or one might turn to Amartya Sen’s insistence that development is not merely economic growth but the expansion of capabilities—education, health, security—that allow people to lead lives they value. These theoretical lenses help explain why the immediate post-revolutionary period can be a time of acute vulnerability: the formal structures that deliver capabilities are disrupted even as the moral and political impetus for change remains.
Esoterically, there is a paradox in the language of liberation itself. Liberation presumes a telos, a destination. But political transitions are often processes without a clear terminus. The esoteric lesson is that the rhetoric of finality—“the regime is gone, the future is ours”—can obscure the protracted, often non-linear work of rebuilding. Humor, then, becomes a survival strategy: a way to laugh at the absurdity of expecting overnight miracles while still insisting on the necessity of change.
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Poignancy and the Ethics of Witnessing
To witness suffering is not merely to observe; it is to be implicated. The poignant claim that “as a Muslim, this has to be the saddest I’ve ever seen the Muslims in the history of Islam” is a statement of moral anguish. It is not a literal historiographical claim—history is long and contains many sorrows—but it is a testimony to the depth of feeling that contemporary crises provoke. Such statements deserve to be taken seriously because they articulate a communal pain that is both personal and political.
Ethically, witnessing imposes obligations. It asks us to resist facile narratives that reduce complex tragedies to moral binaries. It asks us to hold multiple truths at once: that tyranny is intolerable, that foreign intervention can be destructive, and that the aftermath of liberation can be perilous. The humane response is not to choose one truth to the exclusion of others but to craft policies and solidarities that acknowledge the full complexity of human suffering.
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Disconfirming the Alternative
The alternative I must disconfirm is the comforting, teleological narrative: that overthrowing a tyrant is, in itself, the decisive moral and practical victory; that the arc of history bends swiftly toward justice once the despot is removed. This narrative is seductive because it simplifies moral calculus and offers immediate emotional gratification. It is also dangerous because it can blind actors—domestic and foreign—to the responsibilities that follow regime change.
To disconfirm this alternative, consider three linked propositions.
First, regime change without institutional scaffolding often produces fragmentation rather than consolidation. When a centralized authority collapses, local power brokers, militias, and opportunistic actors rush to fill the vacuum. Without neutral institutions—courts, civil service, electoral frameworks—these actors can entrench new forms of predation. The result is not necessarily freedom but a reconfiguration of coercion.
Second, humanitarian outcomes depend on governance capacity, not merely on the identity of rulers. Schools function when teachers are paid and curricula are supported; hospitals operate when supply chains are intact and staff are protected. The removal of a dictator does not automatically restore these capacities. In some cases, the disruption of patronage networks that once funded services can lead to temporary collapse, even if the long-term trajectory is toward improvement.
Third, external interventions that prioritize regime change over post-conflict stabilization can exacerbate suffering. When foreign powers focus on the spectacle of overthrow without committing to the long, costly work of reconstruction, they leave behind a landscape of unmet needs. This is not an argument against all external assistance—far from it—but a critique of interventions that treat liberation as an endpoint rather than the beginning of a complex process.
Taken together, these propositions disconfirm the alternative by showing that overthrow is a necessary but not sufficient condition for better lives. The moral lesson is unglamorous: liberation must be followed by patient institution-building, by investments in human capital, and by a politics that centers the needs of the vulnerable rather than the triumphalism of the victorious.
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Conclusion
If there is a final irony, it is this: those who most fervently desire change are often the first to be disappointed by its messy aftermath. Yet disappointment is not the same as despair. To acknowledge the suffering of Libyan children, to critique the silence of powerful states, and to disconfirm the myth that regime change is a panacea is not to advocate for the status quo. It is to insist on a more honest politics—one that recognizes the moral urgency of ending tyranny while also committing to the unglamorous work of rebuilding schools, hospitals, and civic trust.
Humor, in this register, is not flippancy but resilience. Erudition is not aloofness but a tool for diagnosis. Anecdote is not anecdotalism but a way to keep the human face in view. And irony is not cynicism but a guard against simplistic narratives. The children in Libya deserve more than slogans; they deserve policies that understand the arithmetic of recovery. The Muslim world, and indeed the global community, will be judged not by the fervor of its celebrations but by the steadiness of its commitments to those who suffer in the wake of change.
Let the ignorant celebrate a false and temporary victory if they must; the work of justice is quieter and longer. It asks for patience, resources, and the humility to admit that good intentions are not enough. If we can hold that complexity—if we can grieve without surrendering to fatalism, and hope without indulging in triumphalism—then perhaps the next generation will inherit not only the memory of liberation but the durable institutions that make freedom meaningful.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
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