My Facebook Friend Sara wrote me last Saturday morning to say she was so upset she couldn’t eat, sleep, couldn’t think straight, even in Farsi. She’s a young Iranian American journalist who lives in Washington, DC, and is in no way naïve about what she expected last week’s election to bring. She hasn’t even been particularly in love with the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi as he was part of the power structure during a what has seemed to her to be a long succession of tyrants.
On her FB status update she’d written: Sara is Yellow.
Sara said simply had no idea the election would be flouted like this, that those in power would make it seem like such huge, cosmic joke.
I’ve seen her this heartsick before: Sara’s FB Status on May 1: emoticon :(
Sup? I asked.
Remember that young Iranian woman I told you about? she said. She was executed today.
I looked at my two morning newspapers, also checked the New York Times on-line — Sara had delivered this horrible news me hours before it came up on the newswires.
And I remember this from my own life, remember being made physically ill over the injustices of the world, remember that the only cure for me was to take action, to go speak out, to DO something, to go be with those dozens, hundreds, sometimes hundreds of thousands who took to the streets and with whom I shared fellow feeling. I needed to breathe the same air they were breathing, see them and hear them, feel their vitality.
I wrote back: Soon as you feel better, you NEED to get to your keyboard and WRITE something.
Can’t, she wrote back. I’m a journalist. Have to maintain my supposed ah ha ha journalistic neutrality.
Write for your own sake, I said. I’ll paraphrase. We’ll make a site, okay, & you & me and everyone we know can post to it & you can help me do it b/c I’m electronically inept but you’ll be Anon, all right? but you need to HELP me, Sara, okay? you have to help us b/c most Americans don’t GET Green from Yellow from Red and WE REALLY NEED TO understand this, ok?
Two seconds later I discover myself to be Administrator of an FB site called Condemn Iran’s Sham Elections to which, three seconds after that, people all over the world are posting in English, French, German, and in Persian. It’s really wonderful, I have to say, to see people swearing American curse words in sentences that are otherwise made up of transliterated Farsi.
And I am so at among the FB furious, the righteously indignant, that I naturally cut and paste a quote from one of them to use as my own status update: Natarseen natarseen, ma hame ba ham hasteem!” — “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, we are all in this together!” I write this though I don’t speak a word of Farsi. I get to write this, I feel, because I am – in fact – a citizen of this brave new electronic world.
And we are, in fact — you and me and everyone we know – using these fragile tools to carry the light to them, each in our own small way, and this light of truth and reason and it’s what leaks under the locked door the tyrants believed they had tightly sealed.
Then Sara had another idea: Could I ask my American friends — many of whom are writers and artists and poets to say a sentence or two — messages of hope from individuals, side-stepping the platitudes issued by governments and politicians, that would be directed to the students and young women and young men and gays and doctors and construction workers and the elderly, all those risking their lives and safety and good standing to walk silently in the street in larger and larger masses in defiance of a regime the horrors of which you and I have any clue?
Of course, I said, and the two of us then crafted the letter that I’ve sent to friends far and wide, who’ve then forwarded it on the bubble edge of this miracle that’s fragile but is expanding in that it enables these good wishes to shower down on me, as my email in-box dings to say here, here, here, more words of hope and encouragement for their bravery to all those out in the streets with their fingers up in what we called The Peace Sign, their green wrists wrapped, standing up to tyranny.
Then I forward these to Sara, who will translate them and beam them past the censors to those who need to hear them, Sara, whom I love and honor as a friend, a sister in this struggle, daughter of whom I am vastly proud, though she and I have never actually met.