For Those Who Do Not Want to Participate

This is the sentence I wrote in a little notebook of mine with tearful eyes after I heard of my journalist brother being in solitary confinement:

“Have you heard that history is like a train? Some days ago, this train passed over every single nerve knot of my spinal chord. Sometimes you just try not to see it. I change the tv news channel thinking let the train pass, let it go wherever it wants to go. But this time I had an accident with the train. I can no longer say the direction of the train would not affect me.”

It was a certain level of helplessness and hopelessness that I had never experienced before. You have to go through it to know what it is. It’s different from all the bad news that you can hear of. It’s a different type of pain. Somewhere deep down it deals with your whole ideology and perspective towards life.

It’s at that point that you wish there was only one good person that could help you in that system, Only one. You think it could make a difference if only one person would listen to you. The slightest help or hope, the smallest contact would mean the world to you. The smallest, even in that whole big system. Then I started to think that we need more good people to get involved with politics. More intelligent people. More goodhearted. Before I thought politics is all dirt and that I’m beyond that. That politics only belongs to some crazy people who feel shortages in life and then need a stage to star.

Now, many of us already know that Islamic Republic being separated from people is a myth. We know that there is a lot of diversity in the whole social spectrum but somewhere at some point the gravity center of all Iranian people’s level of intellect is in equilibrium with where the government stands. Nobody in this day and age can claim that it’s not. This system could not stay in tact for thirty years in a steady way otherwise. We know we Iranians are no stranger with radical religious concepts, with superstition, with projecting the blames, with women’s rights injustice, looking at the big picture you see where the comfort zones are and that they are quite dominant. With dictatorship, it starts everyday in many Iranian families. Not in the alley. Let’s all take the responsibility. If you are an intellectual, you are more responsible than someone who is not.

Anyhow, the only way is through stepping towards a civil society. Little by little. And all of us. We are all in the same train. We all know from experience that Revloution is not the solution. We know it brings violence and no country ever became democratized through a bloody revolution without having the right base and foundation. We know that a miracle would not happen. We know that civic participation is a major sign of a civil society. We know that very gradually we have to move the gravity center towards what we think is the right side. People have done that before us in other parts of the world. Same way. We don’t even have to reinvent the wheel. This is not an overnight process, and unfortunately there is no quick fix for it. You and I might not get to see the day that we want to see with all the standards, but today all I was thinking of was a new born in a hospital in a city in Iran. He or she might see a better day. An era with tangible differences from now. Let’s start little by little. Let’s make sure nobody is falling behind. Let’s practice participation and tolerance for hearing what we oppose to. Let’s get the dialogue going. Let’s push the gravity center. Even as a symbolic move. Let’s make voting and civic participation a common sense for the next generation to come.