This isn’t a plea for help, this is just my take on what the movement in Istanbul might bring. Regardless, please make sure to spread the word about what’s going on in Istanbul, because it’s simply too much, and too dangerous.

Today might be an important day for Turkey, when looking back at it 10-15 years from now.

5 days ago, this past Monday, bulldozers drove into Gezi Park, a park in the heart of Istanbul. The reason for the dozing of the park, as I’ve heard it, is to privatize yet another piece of public land. This has been the trend with many pieces of land in the past decade. But for once, people decided to protest against this. I don’t know whether it was because there were many trees, so that Greenpeace wanted to save some green bits of the city, or because it was one of the few calm places right in the midst of the city, or because it is just beautiful, or because whatever. I don’t know.

What I do know is that right now, those protests against the bulldozing have become something completely different.

Today, riot police entered the park at 5 a.m. to move the protesters who had camped out in the park. They dropped canisters and canisters of tear gas in the middle of sleeping bags, burned tents. I don’t know exactly, but I’ve heard that people were beaten brutally while being taken away.

When all that settled down, the crowd gathered again, around noon. This time, the protest was in the form of a public sitting down in Taksim square, and in Gezi Park, I believe. Thousands, sat down. They were literally just sitting down. Then, the police decided it was time to go home, and tear gas and water and more tear gas and more tear gas…

That excessive use of force caused unrest. Someone somewhere said, “when you disperse 10 people with tear gas, 100 more come.” That just happened again and again or something. This evening, 20,000 people are protesting, from the 200-300 in the first day of the protests.

Only, the protest isn’t just about the park anymore.

All the hate, all the anger against the Tayyip Erdogan government culminated in Gezi Park.

The protests are far from their initial peaceful nature now. There are people throwing rocks, at crowd control panzers. A group has took control of these, and painted “O.Ç. Tayyip” (S.O.B. Tayyip) on the back.

But now looking back at the police’s actions, maybe that first bit of excessive violence was a good thing, as it united the people against something. That was the police’s (read: government’s) mistake. What they did there pissed everyone off. And when many people are pissed off at the same time, pissed at the same thing, they unite. Right now everyone’s an activist, everyone’s to a degree an anarchist. For the first time in many, many years, the people are united.

When you talk to people, individually many say that they are against the policies of our government. When you go out on the street and ask people what they think about this, they are against it. So much so you don’t understand how these guys got elected in the first place. But, these people against the government are never united. Well, they were* never united.

This morning, when talking to a friend, we were thinking how this would just go away as many protests have in the past. There were always small events like this, and who remembered them? These are always forgotten, and this one will surely be forgotten, right?

Well, it’s not being forgotten anytime soon. Right now, this is definitely not going away. There are people all over Istanbul protesting. Besides the people at Taksim, people in their homes are protesting simply by making noise with their kitchenware (the Twitter trend “SesVerTürkiyeBuÜlkeSahipsizDeğil” (Make noise Turkey, this isn’t anyone’s country) started this, I believe). In Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, people are marching towards the parliament building.

But even protests of this magnitude go away often, and in a few weeks, this might just be past us as well.

Although, in my opinion, the phrase “past us” won’t be completely appropriate in any case.

People now know that they can come together, and they can actually make a difference. So, even if we don’t have this single protest lead up to some change, people will now know that their coming together might actually mean something.

So, if this movement itself doesn’t cause any direct change, it will definitely influence the people. For one, the people will now know they can unite against the rule. They will know they can cause change. And, that knowledge will be with the people whatever happens after this protest.

I don’t know where our country is going at this moment and I don’t know whether this is a Turkish spring (summer?). But, I do know that now, this country knows that it can be united. I know that, the people are now aware of their power.