My phone rings and I know it’s my mom — she’s the only one who has my landline number, aside from the automated French recording that calls every so often.
“Derrik was arrested in Cairo.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that information.
It was a short phone call — she wanted to make sure that I heard it from her. My cousin was watching the news and three boys appeared. Two were named, the third was identified only as a Georgetown student, but she recognized him right away and called my mom.
As soon as I hung up, my first response was to take to the internet. I asked Google for “americans arrested cairo.” A flurry of news stories popped up. Step two: turn to HootSuite and add a feed for “Derrik Sweeney” and “derriksweeney.” Minutes later I watched the tweet roll in that first IDed the third student — my brother.
During this time I called my dad and there was some uncertainty as to how we should respond. Should we call Georgetown — see if anyone there can help? Should we start alerting the media? Will we be getting him in more trouble? It didn’t occur to me just how intense the media frenzy would become.
Then I saw a tweet alerting Barbara Boxer that her constituent was in need of her assistance.
“Oh. All right. Well now we’re playing with something I understand.” I corrected that tweet — he’s a Missouri resident — and sent some out to both of our Senators and our representative. Within minutes the media emails commenced. There was the initial hesitation — how should we respond to this?
My feeling, the reason I chose the just-keep-talking route, was that there was a real possibility that he could just sort of disappear. It seemed our best ally was some combination of the always-on media and political pressure.
Things from his Facebook appeared in news stories within the hour of his name being made public. Given how little we knew at that point, this seemed like a problem. How many stories are there of people being incriminated less by facts than by the character witness represented in their social media profiles? Derrik’s roommates pointed this out to me and I spent about 45 minutes trying to get it taken down.
Blogger friends suggested flagging his profile — which they, and some of Derrik’s friends, did. I don’t know how long that would have taken; I managed to get in first. Don’t keep a Hotmail account connected to your Facebook. True, there is a sidebar to this story (involving my internet-media-producing-11-year-old self and AOL’s spam policy) that makes this an unfair indictment on Hotmail’s security, but it wasn’t all that difficult for me to convince Hotmail that I was Derrik.
My first interview was a terrifying over-the-phone with CNN. I wasn’t sure which was the greater danger: that I would start sobbing or that I would vomit. My blogger friends started posting the CNN story all over Facebook and started a hashtag on Twitter. (Although, real talk, #BringDerrikSweeneyHome is a really long hashtag. And nobody got the odd spelling on his name right.) The 20sb admin team even put up a post on my behalf. I cannot say enough how much I appreciate all of the support during that terrifying week.
The media circus was unrelenting. Calls home were frequent but always short; my parents were dealing with the press calls and the cameras. In addition to the “What is going to happen to him?” agony there was the stress of ever-changing information. If I mapped it out, the developments were mostly positive, but every two steps forward were accompanied by another step and a half backwards.
There was just so much ambiguity, so many things we didn’t know. Yet we were being asked endless questions in the middle of that anxiety and mis-information. My parents said some things that they’d like to take back, but I understand the place those comments came from.
I understand the fear and the feeling that all you want to do is see this kid and give him a hug and OH LOOK, here is a person who wants to talk to me about him and I feel like my entire world is exploding but maybe if I just keep talking to you I can keep it together so that’s fine I’ll just. keep. talking.
It’s kind of like that. Word vomit is inevitable.
One of the harder pills to swallow was watching everyone develop an opinion on my family. I blog about my life. I am pretty “out there.” But I walk a fine line when it comes to the other “characters” in my life; even when I give them aliases, it doesn’t give me free reign over their stories or the ways in which I represent them. Putting my shit out there is a choice that I made, and that doesn’t give me the right to impose it on everyone around me.
Because this is my blog, I’ll come out and say it: it seems to me that they were arrested for the sole purpose of being paraded about Egyptian television in order to convince people that this wasn’t their cause — that Americans were instigating this (violently, no less). There’s a certain irony to that portrait when you consider the actual relationship between the American government and Egyptian politics, but things like facts weren’t really important here.
Cue reactions back home, falling mostly into two camps: “Serves ’em right for leaving the USA! ‘MERICA’S THE GREATEST. ISOLATIONISM IS AWESOME.” -and- “War mongering Republicans throwing bombs in the Middle East! Let them hang!” I can’t say I found it surprising that few people seemed to entertain the idea that the claims of the Egyptian authorities were bullshit. Unfortunate, sure, but not surprising.
I felt the reality of my family’s newfound out-there-ness during class on Monday night. My professor pointed out questions he felt journalists should have been asking of Derrik — how is it that he got arrested when there are plenty of other Americans in Cairo right now who aren’t?
I was in an awful mood for the next day or two (this is part of why I didn’t know what to write about all of this sooner) until I finally realized what was bothering me: I was furious. Last week I was consumed by an oppressive sense of fear. Fear and anxiety trumped all other emotions. When he was released, I had a couple days of incredible gratitude and happiness.
After that I was brought back to the emotion that underpinned the entire week — anger. One of the most basic rules of sibling relationships is that I can say whatever I want about my siblings, but I will obviously have to fight you if you say anything about them. Over the course of a week, I watched as half the world was given license to berate my little brother. That’s a lot of people to want to fight all at once. I can handle myself, sure, but…
It doesn’t matter that nothing the Egyptian authorities said was true — down to the very location where they were arrested. It doesn’t matter that their backpacks had been brought to Tahrir filled with medical supplies for the makeshift hospital areas set up to care for protesters wounded by the very violent police. It doesn’t matter that arresting them made for very convenient propaganda. None of that is important to the mobs of angry comment trolls who saw his face — his terrified face — set behind a caption about molotov cocktails.
The thing is, none of that matters all that much to me either. For me, there is one basic fact: he is my brother. My parents made some stupid comments in interviews and we have already joked about a few of them. My frustration with derisive responses to those comments doesn’t come from my feeling that they’ve been taken out of context (though I believe they have), it comes from that basic fact that they are my parents.
I’ve been putting my life on public display for a while, but to a minuscule, safe “public.” More importantly, it has been on my terms. This? What just happened? Above and beyond anything I could have prepared for.
But the lesson of last week was ultimately about perspective. On Thanksgiving, when he was ordered released, I was elated. The idea that something so simple — “Your brother is coming home.” — could afford that much happiness? Awesome.
Then there are the countless people who reached out on Facebook and Twitter to spread the word or just remind me that they were keeping my family in their thoughts. I haven’t thanked everyone individually because there are seriously too many. Having too much to be grateful for is a nice problem to have. So for that thank you. Thank you to 20sb, and everyone who tweeted at Congress members, and just everyone who guaranteed, if nothing else, that he would not be allowed to simply vanish in that system. If I’m being honest, that probably even includes the citizens of Trolldom.
Given the choice between taking the poorly articulated vitriol of a thousand avatar heads or my little brother disappearing behind the curtain of a military regime, I happily accept the former.