Scattered to the Wind

blog or whatever about current events

How soon we forget.

 

 

On Saturday, June 13th, the government announced that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the heated 2009 Iranian presidential election. That very day, people took to the streets in protest.

 

They were angry. Ahmadinejad was not nearly popular enough to have won by the margin the media was reporting. Ballots are counted by hand in Iran, yet the results were posted mere hours after the polls closed. The whole thing seemed preposterous, and the nation knew the election had been stolen.

 

Over the course of the next week, Tehran gradually exploded. The world watched as CNN played footage from the streets, each cell-phone video containing the energy and impending disaster of a landmine in slow-motion.

 

They were not just angry because Mousavi had not won. They were angry because their votes had not counted. They were angry because all of the candidates who had run had been chosen beforehand by the Ayatollah. They were angry because their government did not care about them or what they wanted. And as the protests grew violent, they became angry at something else: their parents' generation was fighting to silence their demonstrations. The same men who had removed the Shah on a wave of malignant youthful passion were now killing women in the streets when they cried out for justice.

 

How soon they forgot. There is a new Shah, and his name is Ahmadinejad. There is a new Shah, and his name is Khamenei.

 

People the world over watched with baited breath, wondering if this was the change we had been waiting for. But it was not to be. For all the blood and all the tears, the ocean was still swallowed up by the desert. Evil was allowed to have its way. We exhaled, never having spoken out during the weeks of rage. We went back to our other diversions. True, Neda had died, but so had so many celebrities. The bodies in the streets of Tehran were just more foreigners slain by their government, same old, same old. Here we had familiar faces from our televisions, dropping dead suddenly and too young, laid out in grand ceremonies in gold caskets; this was all novelty, we would watch this instead.

 

How soon we forgot. I pray that countries who already have their freedom, like our own, never lose it. Because we humans have been tested as a race, and we have failed. In the past, we pled ignorance when we were apathetic in the face of injustice. Our grandparents knew that Hitler's Germany was anti-Semitic, but my God, no one ever knew exactly what he was doing. There was no way they could have known, so who can say they let evil have its way?

Our parents knew what was happening in Cambodia, and China, and Rwanda, but they didn't see it every day, it was only in the back of their minds, who could have expected them to do anything?

We know what is happening in Iran. We saw it every day and every night. It was on not only the news, but on Twitter and Facebook, everywhere on the internet, it was shoved in our faces. And we got bored with it. We moved on. We did nothing.

 

They are still protesting, but their cries go unheard.

We were like them once.

 

How soon we forgot.

 

 

 

The streets are ablaze and the people are afraid. But from fire shall come light, a beacon in the darkness to remind the blind, shivering masses that there is a sun, and that a longer day shall surely follow this longest night. Burn on, Tehran.

Reviews

[run vs remember]

Wow, definitely sobering. Things need to change bigtime with the way we view the rest of the world - and act. Good write. Nice ending.