This is not the foul smell of our corrupt politicians that is spewing into the open sky, nor is it that of the nauseating smell of garbage disintegrating in every corner of our streets, and not even that of the deals that have been patched up on a daily basis.

This is reeking odor of our slacking and inaction, mixed with a hint of our blunt, degenerate and nefarious politics.

Our politicians are not the only ones oozing of stink, we have all pitched in.

We stink because we stood mindlessly as our street got swamped by garbage. We stink when we let these young protesters get beaten and hosed down because, unlike us, they decided to put an end to this shenanigan.

Each blow is for every time we failed to claim our rights.

They chose anarchy as an act of defiance on behalf of the people; they have borne the brunt of our trash crisis and took in every single hit.

We stink, so who else is going to pull us out of this filthy situation? What other reasons than stacked up trash, water cuts and power outages, unsafe roads, economic decline, ... would be enough to stir up some action?

How do we walk out of this catastrophe after we have self-willingly marched into it, commissioning the same corrupt officials to represent us and predispose us to the trashy politics?

What does it take for us to shout for our rights without having our demands tinged with political undertones?

We are ready to give up this pluralist system in exchange for Bashar Assad, Hosni Mubarak and Moammar al-Qaddafi so that we can rise altogether against them, sacrifice ourselves and let our blood spill a river for our stolen rights.

Article originally written in Arabic by Rima Abou Khalil.