Mutiny in Egypt. Everyone has seen the chaos and greed of the Egyptian leader and the barbaric actions of its people. Raping and assaulting journalists seem to be the norm and looting and destroying their own ancient treasures seem to be ok as well. Is all the world becoming the middle ages again? Have we learned anything of our past errors in history? Apparently not.

Shame on everyone! The world’s leaders should have put pressure on Mubarak not to be so greedy and share more of his country’s wealth with his people. The United Nations should have gotten more involved. The Embassies of countries should have offered safe havens for visitors to Egypt. The Egyptians, with its respected history should have behaved better.

Again, it is all about money. The country ranks 137 in the world in per-capita income. The United States has been particularly generous to Egypt. We gave Mubarak, Egypt’s leader nearly $2 billion in annual U.S. aid, another $5 billion from dues from the Suez Canal and $10 billion from tourism. This greedy leader could have easily kept his people happy with $80 billion given to him just from the United States alone in recent years. Instead, while he lives in a palace as their leader for decades, the Egyptian people live on about 2 dollars a day. He should have poured boiling oil at them and dredged a moat around his castle as in the middle ages while his people starved.

Egypt failed in that they had no path to their future. You can have economic reform, or you can have political reform. You cannot have neither. For a country that has been known for a wealth of history and advances in civilization, they have dropped to an all time low. Egypt is now known for chaos, greed and no ethics in human behavior thanks to those brave journalists who shared with the world the reality of Egypt’s demise.

The future could bring worse as seen in the fall of the Communists in Russia. That country has more unethical people in leadership roles than good people. Egypt can also fall to radical regimes or more chaos. The young in Egypt-two-thirds of the population is under the age of 30-believe that they have no future and they are correct. Under Mr. Mubarak, their food and housing is subsidized and they are placed in jobs or left unemployed limbo, not starving but without any hope of anything but years of numbing sameness.

Egyptians need time to prepare for elections of new leaders. They need to form a constitution to stop the effects of years of government oppression. Time is short even if the presidential elections go forward as expected in September. It is good that now that Mubarak has stepped down political alternatives are possible. We have to hope that the Egyptian people will choose a democratic future of freedom and not an Islamist future of imposed extremism. A government committed to building a free and democratic Egypt.