Dear Friend & Reader:
You can’t turn away.
Watching today’s newscasts of Iranian post-election protests described by journalists from around the world, I’m reminded of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the white shirts of the pro-immigration rallies in Los Angeles the spring of 2006, and even the assembly of over a million people on the streets of Washington, D.C. Jan. 20, 2009, the inauguration of the first African-American President of the United States:
We’re watching a piece of an entrenched part of the world starting to shake apart.
As I read through the blogs, I found most of the stronger ones were video diaries,В pictures from local photographersВ and international news reports, untarnished by speculation. Just events as they were happening.
Watching, I could not help but feel a familiar sense of release and joy coupled with fear — fear for the young who are participating in these elections and protests with no idea of what may be or what will happen to them; fear for the women, particularly the young women who are putting their futures and lives on the line under hard rule by oppression, fear for the opposition candidate.В But all these fears were mixed, a blend evolving from a bittersweet brew into a rich draught that we’re watching. Live. Its almost as if we can taste it.
Its no small thing when a table leg upon which you’ve rested your world-view for a generation suddenly collapses.В I recall watching the 1979 protests and demonstrations in Tehran. It was the fall of the Shah, and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and religious fundamentalism in the Middle East.В It was the beginning of the chill between the United States and Iran, and for that matter, the Muslim world. В I remember the American hostages taken from the embassy in Tehran, and the fall of the Presidency of Jimmy CarterВ because of it, co-engineered by American right-wing military operatives like Oliver North and most likely the CIA,В invested in seeing a pro-military Republican President take office: Ronald Reagan.