The Day of the Green

It is just under four hours until the scheduled Saturday rally in Tehran. The expectations seem to be strong that today may be a decisive day given the Supreme Leader’s statements Friday. It is the middle of the night here in Seattle. It will still be hours before sunrise here when things will happen… if they happen… perhaps things will just dissipate without a major event… but that seems increasingly unlikely. Despite the time of day in my part of the world, I find myself compelled to try to watch as close to real time as I can. I may nap some, but my alarm is set just in case I fall asleep. Watching Twiterfall, there is not much new at the moment, and not much on other sources. Everybody is just waiting for 4 PM Tehran time (12:30 UTC). I’ve given up on TV news. I won’t even turn it on unless I hear from other sources that there is something worth watching. I have BBC World Service radio on… but they have something non-live and not about Iran at the moment. I suspect even if things start happening, I’ll hear more faster online.

In the meantime, I just spent some time scanning through Andrew Sullivan’s latest Live-Tweeting The Revolution post. Of course all the usual caveats about interpreting raw information of this sort apply in spades. You need to be have a bit of healthy skepticism. And of course I know that if I were to discuss specific issues and ideas with the people demonstrating, I’d almost certainly disagree with them strongly on more issues than I agreed with them. Never the less, what has been visible over the last week has been moving and inspiring. It is worth reading all of the tweets Sullivan has collected. You also see other moving things in other places which are reposting things written by people on the scene.

One particularly memorable example, from an Iranian blogger at balatarin.com translated by NIACBlog and linked from Sullivan:

I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I’m two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children…

I hope for something like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I fear that it will be more like Tiananmen in 1989.

We shall see.

In the mean time, my thoughts and attention are with the sea of green in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran.