Person of the Year?

Time recently published their Person of the year article where they pick the most influential person of the past year.  They awarded this year to "The Protester".  Besides my obvious quibbles about that not being an actual person, I think they did get the spirit of the award right but in my mind there is an actual protester whom they should have awarded this prize to.

Mohammad Bouazizi was a Tunisia fruit seller who supported his family after his father passed away while he was young.  Bouazizi had been undergoing harassment from government officials who would try to extort bribes or would mess with his fruit cart.  One day after a government official stole his scales, he went to the governors office to complain.  Getting frustrated that he was not being heard, Bouazizi threatened to light him self on fire if they did not listen to his complaint.  When they didn't listen, he walked into the middle of the street and lit himself on fire.  Bouazizi died days later but this act galvanized many people to rise up. Within a month, the Tunisian president, who had ruled for 23 years and did not look like he was going anywhere, was forced to step down from power.  The success further galvanized people across the middle east to organize protests through social media channels which eventually overturned some of the worlds longest running dictators like Qaddafi (Libya) and Mubarak (Egypt).

For a half a century, the status quo of military dictators seemed so entrenched.  Even when I asked Egyptians while studying in Cairo, they basically assumed that Mubarak's son would take power and life would keep going on like usual.  Its sometimes hard to imagine for Americans, but until these revolutions over half of the country had never seen anyone else rule than the dictator in power.  While people recognized that this was less than ideal, that was just the way things were and was something that you just had to accept.  Bouazizi changed that.  Was Bouazizi trying to galvanize a revolution across the middle east?  Probably not.  He had just had enough of his situation and wanted to be heard.

While "the protester" is the one who actually executed the revolution, the revolution would never have happened without Bouazizi, so in my opinion he deserves to be Person of the Year.