Several years ago, Tom Browkaw, the previous NBC news anchor man wrote a book called “The Greatest Generation”. It was a best seller for many weeks on New York Times’ best seller list. In his book, Brokaw contended that the greatest generation of Americans were there ones who grew up during the Great Depression and then went on to fight in WWII and those whose productivity and sacrifice within the war’s home front made a decisive material contribution to the war efforts. After reading this book, I was in full agreement with the conclusions. Sacrifice of 1 generation made a super power out of the U.S.
Then, a few days after the so called elections in Iran and the protests that ensued I started to think about the greatest generation of Iranians. I must say that personally, I am ashamed of my generation as well as all the generations going back to my great great grand parents. I am more so ashamed of the Muslims living in these periods because they were in majority by far. My great grand father was some sort of Shiet cleric and actually ran a mosque in Semnan. One of his decisions caused the death by stoning of a 17 year old woman who allegedly committed adultry even though 2 of her female relatives testified on Quran that she was raped. Anyhow, too much digression.
During the time span of these last 5 generations, Iranians were busy with “tan parasti” as opposed to “vatan parasti”. Although for example the motto during Shah’s reign was “Khoda, Shah, Meehan”, in reality meehan was not even in the top 10. Hell top 25. We Iranians only care about ourselves and our immediate family. We talk about patriotism and loving Iran but most of us have done jack shit for Iran. There are families with martyrs from the time of war with Iraq. But other than the soldiers who were forced to go to the war fronts, the ones who went volunteerly went more for Islam than Iran. For generation after generation Iranian men either promoted oppression of women or did not do a damn thing about it. No sacrifice. Same with plight of the Bahais and Jews in Iran. Everyone used to say “yeah, these Bahais are mazloom and not mardom azar” but nothing more than lip service.We stood by as these people got killed and discriminated against.
The generation of Iranians that is now between the ages of 15-25 is different; not all of them but at least the ones not regularly paid by IRI or brainwashed in Mosques. These are the courageous young men and women who are putting their lives and the lives of their immediate family members in grave jeopardy by participating in mostly non violent protests. They want a free Iran so they can live free. They see women and their equals. They don’t want help from anyone or any foreign nation to achieve the goal of democracy in Iran; THEY want to be the agents of change and progress in Iran, for themselves and their children.
So, I nominate the young men and women protesters in Iran as the greatest generation of Iranians.
