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with a stop at Wal-Mart. I needed headphones and batteries for my radio gear but I also bought surgical masks, a bottle of vinegar, and a pair of children's swim goggles. I figured, since the adult pairs were tinted, they would fair poorly in the dark. Once night fell on Wednesday, West Florissant street in this St Louis suburb, police filled the streets with tear gas.

I've been based in Cairo the last three years, where I learned that vinegar can help stem the effects of tear gas, after the fact. (The goggles and surgical masks are more preventative.) This wasn't the first time that the images coming out of Ferguson looked like Cairo, or the chain of events sounded like them.

But by Friday things had ostensibly changed. Missouri's Governor Jay Nixon performed a changing of the guard and softened police tactics. The police would take a more hands off approach, according to he and Captain Ron Johnson, the new top cop. I wouldn't need those children's goggles or the vinegar, and there wouldn't be armored vehicles standing off with protestors. A sniper trained his rifle on protestors from the top of an armored vehicle the day before. Not far away there was a concert and dancing.

Protests in Tahrir Square are a social affair, often with a front of hardcore demonstrators facing off with the police, keeping them from launching tear gas into the crowd of families congregating. I once got a whiff, and when I ran from the front I stumbled into what was essentially a block party only 200 yards away. One man sold surgical masks while other vendors sold sweet potatoes and cotton candy. Cotton candy became a symbol of the surrealism of protests and clashes in Egypt: a stack of cotton candy, a pink cloud set against the black plumes from burning police cars.

Ferguson's version of protest absurdity included a man on a horse in the middle of black suburbia, a small train that looked like it should shuttle people around a petting zoo, and people walking side-by-side and having a conversation with their hands up. They were incongruous with Ferguson's protestors' stories of being denied their dignity and humanity by the police.

These stories could have come straight from Tahrir. A woman said her son was shot nine times by police. A young man said he would be stopped two or three times a week for nothing. A retiree said the St Louis County Attorney is out to get the younger black community.

Al-Jazeera was attacked with tear gas, without warning, for merely filming police activity. I doubt the St. Louis police loathe the Qataris as much as Egyptian deep state, but they did dislike media attention enough to shoot a tear gas canister straight at their camera.

Another camera, thankfully, was across the street filming the whole thing. No media choppers would've been able to film it since they were banned from airspace. Unparalleled press freedom is one of our country's primary points of pride—and a part of its very first amendment—but the way police in Ferguson have paraded over that freedom has dealt a blow to anyone touting American exceptionalism in the midst of protest.

It's a startling realizationwhen the problems of one of the Arab world's police states draw American parallels. The legacies of colonialism and slavery are two different animals, but enduring institutions have carried over their core practices—subjugation, forced quiet, and visible oppression.

There are lessons here and one is that the playbooks for those defending the status quo are often the same. Ferguson police released a statement that there were agitators among the crowd, the go-to PR line in Egypt after police open fire. At home, those unsympathetic to the protests focus on assessing the character of the protestors rather than the legitimacy of their demands.

Egypt's revolution should be a cautionary tale for Ferguson. Three years ago, the Egyptian army descended into the streets and convinced protestors that the two entities were on the same team. Thursday in Ferguson, demonstrators posed for selfies with police officers moments after lamenting, in tears, the loss of Mike Brown and the militarized vehicles that had descended on their neighborhood.

Thursday's victory in Ferguson seemed to have been over police brutality, not over the systems that were in place that allowed an unarmed Mike Brown to be shot in broad daylight on a street. That victory was not over the institutional thinking that police should not release his killer's name—at least until they could release a separate videotape that implicated Brown in a robbery that had nothing to do with his detainment. That victory had nothing to do with their attempts to shut out journalists from covering all of it.

At the first anniversary of the mass protests in Egypt, there was a rigid split between those there to protest, and those there to celebrate. By late Thursday night the hashtag #partest—or party/protest—had been gaining traction. There's celebration: The police brutality would be over in Ferguson for now, it appeared. The circumstances that led to the death of a black teenager—and the buckpassing of accountability for his death—would remain, as it always has been, unresolved.

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