Green shoots of #Freedom*

#iranelection… one of many strings of characters that effectively broke the monolithic molds of perception over the entire planet; the people of Iran, albeit via the highly restrictive medium of 140 characters-only twitter, took on a third dimension, the dimension of living people just like you and I: people with yearnings for better days, aspirations for tangible elements of justice in their daily lives, people of this, our world. Iranians no longer conjure up the caricatures of a threatening people, hungry for world hegemony; they now invoke the green budding shoots, like young living plants, bursting out through the cracks of the walls of oppression.

These past seventeen days have pushed aside our political and religious ideologies and rekindled our knowledge and love of humanity, its universality, along with the unpleasant unveiling of the underbelly of power, wherever it may be, serving whichever religious or political creed: when the powerful cast is threatened, it resorts to unbridled repressive violence. This is a time tested and proven formula. We know it; we have accepted its polished marketed version, here in the west, since September, eight years ago, because no political system is immune to this disease of power. We can inherit the richest and most complete of freedoms to only see it usurped under the guise protection.

What is going on in #Iran? Why did the powerful kill #Neda? Is it because of hurried and sheer panic? Power at all cost, whatever it takes; illustrated in the short mobile phone videos of Basiji militia shooting wildly and indiscriminately into the crowds below, from Tehran’s rooftops, or dropping teargas from helicopters to subdue the herds of scorned Iranians. From our limited vantage point, this is what we believe is happening in #iran. Because we do not have access to real time reporting, because we do not have the luxury of confirmation, we end up receiving shreds of raw, unfiltered slivers of the real situation, small aspects that carry massive symbolic value consequent to their rarity.

Twitter, initially, then educated commentaries, created a flow of repeated and reformulated droplets of truth, the precious water, of which many doubted the source, sought confirmation and found certainty in its repetition, as it leaked through the aging walls of the powerful rulers of Iran.

Freedom will always prevail because its resilience is built in, that is the engine of our human history. However shocking, brutal and horrifying its struggle, that is in fact the easy part, because at that time, right and wrong are clearly defined, without any need for nuance… keeping Freedom flourishing is the next struggle that is left up to us, once we have forgotten how and why we inherited Freedom in the first place.

*# or hash tags are used in twitter to facilitate topic searches and to effectively build up and gather comments into topic-specific forums.

Tags: twitter #iranelection #neda