CAIRO, Egypt — Only time will tell if Tuesday's "Day of Rage" protests in Egypt produce the sort of long-lasting social upheaval that would threaten President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year reign.
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But whatever the long-term outcome, the protests have already moved the Arab world's most populous nation into uncharted waters, proving that nothing in the Middle East may be the same again after the waves of civil unrest that drove Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from power in one breathtaking month.
For starters, there was the sheer size of the turnout, which was larger than anything I've seen in 13 years of covering Egyptian protests. Tuesday was the first time I've ever been in a situation where the protesters potentially outnumbered riot police on the ground.
The Egyptian government's standard operating procedure is to overwhelm any public protest with a massively disproportionate wave of black-clad police. As a result, most protests tend to boil down to the same 500 noisy hard-core activists hopelessly penned in by thousands of riot cops.
But today those numbers were reversed, and the police, at times, seemed completely confused and struggling to keep up. In one confrontation outside the Supreme Court building in downtown Cairo, the riot police attempted to lock arms in a human chain to block the protesters' path. Their effort, however, proved hopelessly ineffective -- waves of marchers simply overwhelmed them and continued on their path.
When all else failed, the police turned to tear gas in an attempt to control the swelling crowds. At one point, I was caught up in an acrid cloud of gas as protesters fled, doused their heads with water, and tended to those who had collapsed. In a surreal moment, I found myself on a sidewalk surrounded by both protesters and riot police -- all of them gagging from the gas.
The makeup of the crowd -- a true mishmash of young and old, male and female, Christian and Muslim -- was also different from protests past. One woman in her mid-50s, who declined to give her name, said she had never before gotten involved in politics. But today she came out with her two teenage sons "to show them that it's possible to demonstrate peacefully for change."
I spent the day moving throughout downtown Cairo trying to keep track of a dizzying series of fast-moving events. It started with a lesson on how a new generation of activists -- dismissed ahead of time by Interior Minister Habib al-Adly as "a bunch of incognizant, ineffective young people" -- is using electronic means to stay one step ahead of the authorities.
Organizers announced long ago that the protesters would gather outside the Interior Ministry downtown, prompting police to lock down that area. But shortly after noon, it became clear that was a clever bit of misdirection, as a whole new set of gathering points was distributed via Facebook and Twitter.
Egyptians used the #jan25 Twitter hashtag to spread news and encouragement about the course of the protests. "If Mubarak goes down, there are going to be enough presidents in Saudi to make a soccer team!" read one representative tweet by @MinaAFahmy. Other tweets linked to Facebook groups that listed a series of new meeting spots and contact numbers.
As the day progressed, the series of scattered protests moved through different parts of the city, growing in strength as they joined up with other groups and induced onlookers and residents to join in.
In a memorable moment, the 150-person-strong protest I was following met up with a much larger protest coming the opposite direction. The two sides embraced in the street amid raucous cheering and began marching together.
At one point, more than a thousand people stood outside a building on along the Nile belonging to Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party, chanting "illegitimate" and "Oh Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you" -- a reference to Ben Ali's abrupt flight into exile less than two weeks ago.
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