{"id":15684,"date":"2009-06-16T15:18:32","date_gmt":"2009-06-16T20:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=15684"},"modified":"2009-06-16T16:31:12","modified_gmt":"2009-06-16T21:31:12","slug":"covering-irans-post-election-demonstrations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/covering-irans-post-election-demonstrations\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark These Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Friend & Reader:<\/p>\n

You can’t turn away.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in Czechoslovakia, the white shirts of the pro-immigration rallies in Los Angeles<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

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We’re watching a piece of an entrenched part of the world starting to shake apart.<\/p>\n

As I read through the blogs, I found most of the stronger ones were video diaries,\u0412\u00a0pictures from local photographers\u0412\u00a0and international news reports<\/a>, untarnished by speculation. Just events as they were happening.<\/p>\n

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.\u0412\u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n

Its no small thing when a table leg upon which you’ve rested your world-view for a generation suddenly collapses.\u0412\u00a0I 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.\u0412\u00a0It was the beginning of the chill between the United States and Iran, and for that matter, the Muslim world. \u0412\u00a0I remember the American hostages taken from the embassy in Tehran, and the fall of the Presidency of Jimmy Carter\u0412\u00a0because of it, co-engineered by American right-wing military operatives like Oliver North and most likely the CIA,\u0412\u00a0invested in seeing a pro-military Republican President take office: Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n

Thirty years later, the world is much smaller, accessible by hand held devices like your BlackBerry, \u0412\u00a0messaging on Twitter, YouTube videos, any channel open on the web with a blog written by people providing actual accounts. The world, or at least one dimension of the world, is now instantly available and you have time to react almost as the moments happen in real time.<\/p>\n

How are we supposed to respond to news that happens almost without news coverage? Conventional wisdom? Cultural demagoguery? An Andy Rooney editorial on 60 Minutes<\/em>? Is there any time to be cynical or distant? Or \u0412\u00a0because its proximity in time to the event itself,\u0412\u00a0are we actually being given a chance to feel, engage in and form our own opinions and perceptions of the actual course of human events?<\/p>\n

Whatever we’re watching, whatever we’re feeling, some gut instinct developed over the years watching the world says: mark these days. The world is<\/em> changing. How we react as history approaches us like these last few days teaches us, moment by moment, about us. What will be our response to these changes? Will we\u0412\u00a0react as we have in the past thirty years\u0412\u00a0or can we use the information to\u0412\u00a0do something new? With Iran,\u0412\u00a0from the days of the American hostages to the “Axis of Evil”, can we find how much we continue to differ from each other, or how much we are the same?<\/p>\n

Alice Walker writes:<\/p>\n

There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the mountaintop. Gandhi dying with the name of God on his lips. Sojourner Truth baring her breasts at a women’s rights convention in 1851. Harriet Tubman exposing her revolver to some of the slaves she had freed, who fearing an unknown freedom, looked longingly backward to their captivity, thereby endangering the freedom of all. To be such a person or to witness anyone at this moment of transcendent presence is to know that what is human is linked, by a daring compassion, to what is divine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It makes you pause as you ponder the cycle of the polarity between Iran and the US. Its\u0412\u00a0coming back to a loop, re-joining together the edges\u0412\u00a0through time and human events. Given our history together and the many waves of brinksmanship this polarity created, at this moment we may be coming to the realization we are much closer and more similar as cultures and societies than we were led to believe. Now if we do manage to get there, we can’t afford to forget that again.<\/p>\n

Yours & truly,<\/p>\n

Fe Bongolan<\/strong>
\nSan Francisco<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,1788,52,1479],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15684"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}