There were people hurt. There were people killed. But the victims were not the losers in a fight, because…they didn’t fight. They protested. Peacefully. Martin Luther King would have been proud. The successful Egyptian revolution was one of peaceful protest.

I know you’ve seen pictures of bloodied faces and bodies being carried, and tear gas wafting through the scene. But please keep in mind there were millions of people protesting. The “death toll” is around 400 and a significantly large proportion of these were actually outside Cairo where (a) there are far fewer educated people and (b) any kind of meaningful protest means anything at all.

Americans have a difficult time analyzing and gauging political change, because our own system is so befuddled by confusion. Take the health care issue, for example. To me and I hope the vast majority of sane onlookers, this is a baby step towards a society that guarantees the health of all its citizens. But I don’t have to remind you of how many think radically differently.

So we tend to listen to change that is evident and obvious and immediate, and I think we also sort of fear it. We are worried that change will take away or at least restrict the rights we currently enjoy, which are wonderfully substantial. So for the vast millions of Americans who still don’t know who Mubarak is much less Elbaradei or Wael Ghonim, they pay attention only when something of ultimate drama happens: death. That’s what TV is made of.

But the fact is that there were very, very few deaths compared to the demonstrations that took place. This is remarkable. Imagine the hundreds of thousands of unarmed and determined individuals who so believed in human rights that they stood upright against heavily armed security forces. Who were ready to sacrifice their safety for an idea. Fortunately, a ridiculously small proportion had to. In fact, it’s something of a testament to the restraint of the security forces and particularly the army that so few were hurt.

I remember my own days as a youthful protester in the 1960s, unarmed as the Egyptians were, charged by police as the Egyptians were, tear-gassed as the Egyptians were, shot at as the Egyptians were. And our few friends who were hurt and died were unarmed, as the few Egyptians who were hurt and unarmed.

There are literally hundreds of videos like the one above, showing hundreds and thousands of protesters, unarmed, demonstrating against highly armed government forces. But by their sheer numbers and naked sacrifice, they won. They’ve won round one.

In America especially we tend to focus on the violence of any event, for two main reasons: it’s wrong, and it makes good TV. But what every person must take so far from the Egyptian revolution is that given the hundreds of thousands of people involved, the millions ultimately, the amount of violence was unimaginably small.

It’s hard for Americans to imagine a dictator falling with so little violence. We are told our wars are waged against dictators, and the level of violence that follows our policy is legend. The number of our own soldiers killed much less locals in Afghanistan and Iraq to topple that regime numbers in the tens if not hundreds of thousands.

We can’t believe Egypt has changed regimes with fewer deaths in a month than America sustained monthly in Afghanistan and Iraq for years.

But it’s true. Grasp it and embrace it. Only good will come out of this. There will be many skeptics and cynics out there now saying, “Yes, but what will come next?” I’m not so naive as to suggest this revolution is over, completed. But I’m idealistic enough and optimistically hopeful enough to command the axiom that only good can come out of the power of peace.

So what’s more important: water or security? Egypt is as critically important to East Africa as to America, but it is America that is consumed with watching real-time developments there.

The infamous 1917 Balfour Declaration, which is arguably one of the diplomatic starting points for the current drama in Egypt, was not a singular British act. A series of British treaties about the use of the Nile River was thrust on East African countries about the same time as well.

The notorious 1929 treaty, and the brazen 1959 treaty (I say “brazen” because by 1959 Britain had already decided to give independence to most of East Africa) ceded the use of Nile waters, which arise in East Africa and flow through it, to Egypt.

Water use may be the most critical development tool left in the world. Yet as it stands now, Egypt has successfully enforced its treaties with East Africa, effectively denying Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Sudan, sovereign use of the river.

Everyone in East Africa knows that a new Egyptian regime, particularly a democratic one, will be more disposed to reconsidering these one-way, counter-intuitive agreements.

So what happens in Egypt could have a much greater impact on the lives of East Africans than the lives of Americans.

Americans don’t have to worry about water. So we have found other things to worry about, the principal being terrorism. What happens in Egypt now is an intriguing chess came the outcome of which we fear will effect our security.

Yes, probably, but not as much as how it will effect the use of water in East Africa.

So why are Americans so much more consumed with what’s happening in Egypt than East Africans?

Because like so much in American life, we have turned the event into one of entertainment, and that it seems is our paramount endeavor.

And because the rest of the world struggles more. They know on a daily basis how to deal with true threats and denials of basic needs.

In America, today, nothing gets learned except as entertainment. Everything from new cancer drugs to space discoveries is presented as a movie. Incidental perhaps to what are truly our daily needs like a meal and a few breaths of fresh air, we have become so well off that to get our attention about anything we need good graphics and Dolby surround sound.

And this is also why we’re so obsessed with “security.” Because security guarantees uninterrupted entertainment.

I confess. I’ve got Aljazeera streaming in the office right now, and I flip between CNN and MSNBC waiting for the figurative pyramids to fall. And then?

As Egypt’s struggles continue anti-American sentiment grows in places as far away and dear to me as Kenya. Some of this is envy of the powerful but some of it legitimately derides an unfair world order.

Yesterday a widely read blogger in Nairobi associated with one of its main talk radios warned Kenyans of “the rude awakening that has visited the people of Egypt” that their leaders have been “serving a foreign master’s agenda.”

And that master was, among a few others, America.

With bitterness that verged on vitriol, Solomon Gichira writes, “We all know one or two reasons as to why the world came running to our rescue after the 2007/8 election crisis… because they feared losing supplies from our flower or dairy industries among others. However, they will never package their interests that plainly.”

Gichira is referring to the massive intervention by mainly the U.S. and Britain following Kenya’s fraudulent 2007 elections. Led by Kofi Annan the international rescue of Kenya included more than $10 billion and supported first a power sharing deal between the two rival candidates for president and a range of incentives that led to Kenya’s new, excellent August 2010 constitution.

Gichira is dead wrong when he gets specific yet important because he represents a huge swath of public opinion in the educated developing world. Moreover, his general contention is right: world powers don’t do anything altruistically; it must be in self-interest.

U.K. and U.S. interests could care less if Manchester flower markets don’t have enough roses. A more important reason, “strategic interest” in polispeak, is Kenya’s geopolitical position in the war on terror. Kenya’s often superficially irritating actions in this regard, like allowing Omar al-Bashir into the country, detaining radical mullahs without trial, and letting military equipment sneak overland into the South Sudan, are all applauded silently in the halls of Westminster and Washington.

And Kenya’s overt actions with regards to the South Sudan and its constant border squabbles with whatever is left of Somali receive constant praise from the west.

These are the west’s true interests. But Gichira is right: it is an agenda dictated from abroad, one that is not necessarily wholly in Kenya’s interests.

Gichira’s account of the modern history of Egypt and its neighbors leaves something to be desired, but he basically underscores the botched handling of the “Jewish question” and the poor way that both Israel and subsequently Palestine were created by world powers. He rightly conveys in my opinion how Britain deftly relieved itself of Jewish prejudice by exporting it to the Middle East where it ferments worse today.

And he’s right on when berating Britain and France’s manipulation with the U.S. in the security council of the nascent Arab revolutions to overthrow potentates like Farouk, how this led to anti-American sentiment and Cold War support by Russia. That led, by the way, to those “revolutionary” regimes being subverted still again … just by the east, instead of the west.

So basically while I think like so many revolutionary enthusiasts Gichira misuses facts at his peril, his conclusions reflect the feelings of many of us progressives in the west: Developing world peoples have been mistreated mostly by being ignored, and when not ignored, by being used for “self-interest.”

The problem is that I don’t know how this could ever have been different. Big guys bully small guys. That’s our world order. And try as we do to elevate this morality, we just haven’t been able to yet.

“What is not told to the ordinary reader is that the Camp David agreement” Gichira writes “brought with it huge American goodies to the Egyptian leadership” including “financial and military support” and “America’s blind eye to oppression and suppression of any conscious or dissenting voices” in Egypt.

And so now for “the US and Tel Aviv administrations, the chicken have finally come to roost.”

Gichira now tells us that we will “painfully watch as you lose your Mubarak. Not to your well equipped American-Anglo-French-Jewish military muscle, but to the unarmed power of a dissenting population that has had enough of your meddling. At that point, you will remember that the silence Egyptians over these years of your misdeeds and myopic interest was not anything like an acceptance but a big lie.”

Powerful stuff.

I don’t like feeling the whipping boy in a geopolitical contest of David vs Goliath, but I am the American and Gichira is the Kenyan. In the global context of world history, I am the villain simply because I’ve been the privileged, and Gichira is the victim, simply because he’s been the less privileged.

I could apologize for my ancestors’ misdeeds, but I don’t know what would have been better, so I can’t apologize. I don’t know that there would have been a better way.

But what I do know now, thanks to the transparency and intellectual stimulation that gives rise to voices like Solomon Gichira, is that we can begin to act responsibly in a global way, right now. We can stop any overt or tacit support of the Mubarak regime. We can let the streets play out, because now, those Egyptians, like Gichira, are totally capable of handling their own affairs.

Let them come to power, and then let them deal with us. We, too, were once revolutionaries.