Sunday, my old training partner from cycling showed up with her husband. (Hey, before you accuse me of being a wimp, note that she’s twenty years younger than me and was a pretty competitive collegiate racer – not that I’m insecure or anything.) He’s Iranian, came here after the Revolution like so many others, and was just back from Iran where he visited his family.
We visited for a while, and I unsurprisingly started asking him about what things were like right now.
He said that even the rank-and-file fundamentalists are disgusted with the current regime and are looking for change. There is a core, however, who he believes will not just step aside is politely asked. And unlike the last revolution (in which I gather that he participated in Phase I, deposing the Shah, but not Phase II, bringing in the mullahs), the ‘street’ appears to have not yet developed a taste for the fight he believes will be needed to actually make a change.
So he describes a country where things are slowly grinding to a halt as more and more people wait for something … anything to happen.
The religious police are suddenly timid…he typically gets interviewed and harassed every time he goes back. This time they called his mother, asked for a number where they could call him that night…and never called back.
And then he described going to the airport to come home, and the difference between out two societies was made clear to me. As he approached and then entered the airport in Tehran, we was thinking the whole time about how far he could go before he couldn’t run away…at what point in entering the airport he would be unable to escape the security police and would, if they wanted to arrest him, be theirs.
I’ll think about that the next time I get annoyed at the TSA folks for swabbing my laptop.