One Egyptian's Surrender: The Revolution Failed Mahmoud Abou Adhma's despair over Egypt's course the past 16 months has turned him from an avid revolutionary who camped out in Tahrir Square for most of the 18 days of protests demanding the fall of Hosni Mubarak to working for the presidential campaign of the deposed leader's last prime minister and close friend. The 56-year-old Cairo tailor's misery over his own turnaround was visible - his whole body shook with it as he chatted with a circle of young neighbors half his age. It's not that he didn't understand the "humiliation" Egyptians felt under Mubarak's regime, he told them, he'd seen it firsthand. But they had to face facts, the revolution failed. They spoke sitting outside a polling station in Cairo's middle class district of Abdeen as Egyptians lined up this weekend to vote on a successor to Mubarak as president, choosing between former prime minister Ahmad Shafiq and the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi. Abou Adhma is emblematic of the confusion many Egyptians have gone through since February 2011 when the leader of three decades finally stepped down. Mubarak's fall brought an ecstatic sense of accomplishment among millions who joined the mass protests and persevered through violent crackdowns by security forces and regime supporters. As the old regime fought back to retain its powers, that has given way to a wide range of emotions - despair and disappointment among many, stubborn defiance among others. The generals who took over from Mubarak oversaw a torturous and lopsided transition which they promised would lead to a democratically elected government and president. They proclaimed themselves the defenders of the revolution's goal: a deep change from Mubarak's corrupt police state. The protesters summed it up, "Bread, social justice and human dignity." Instead, the military is as entrenched as ever. And Abou Adhma has surrendered. He works as a poll representative for Shafiq, the candidate his friends consider certain to preserve the old system but who he has decided can at least keep stability. It is impossible now to get rid of them. How can we? There is layer after layer of them," he said to shouts of protest from his friends. Shafiq will win anyway. We might as well just get ourselves used to it again. The country is going down the drain. We should try to save what is left of it," he said. There is no revolution and no one will be able to do this again. No one will go to the square again. Sipping his tea alongside his friends outside the poll station Saturday, the first of two days of voting, Abou Adhma insisted that if anyone had seen the worst of Mubarak's regime, it was him. "We lived the humiliation his regime put us through," he said. He worked in Iraq as a laborer for 17 years, one of millions of Egyptians who migrated there in the 1980s for jobs impossible to find at home. For him, the experience underlined how little regard the Mubarak system had for its own people. Hundreds of the migrants ended up in Saddam Hussein's army fighting and dying in Iraq's war with Iran. Others were killed in disputes with Iraqis. Mubarak once dismissed their deaths, saying, "Why did they go there in the first place?" Their returns in coffins were a deeply disturbing moment for the national psyche.