Changes

[kate_schaefer]

I posted here on the first of the year. If I'm going to manage to post at least once a month this year, I'd better post now, while it's still February.

Along with the rest of the world, I've been watching the demonstrations and revolts in North Africa with keen interest. Back in the mid-eighties, I had a friend at work whose elderly father was imprisoned in Iran. He had been imprisoned under the shah, and now he was imprisoned under the Ayatollah Khomeini, in slightly worse conditions. My Iranian friend was understandably worried aobut his father, and we talked about him and the situation in Iran frequently. One day I said something about how horrible the new regime in Iran was, and my friend agreed, but said that it was by no means the worst in the middle east. No? I said, Then what would the worst be?

Libya under Qaddafi, he said. He had to repeat Qaddafi a few times before I knew who he meant, because the way he said it sounded more like Hassafi to me; I do not have a good ear for Arabic names at all. Syria under Hafez al-Assad would be next worst, he said, and then maybe Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Only then would Iran under Khomeini come into the running. Yes, even though his father was in prison and might die there, even so.

Over the next few months, my friend's father was eventually allowed a visit from a doctor, and finally he was released. I left that job and lost touch with my friend, so I did not hear whether his father left the country. The point of this story -- the story part, as opposed to the part where it's a narration about actual people's actual lives -- is that my Iranian friend retained his ability to make subtle political distinctions between tyrants even while his beloved father was suffering under one. I, his naive young American friend, remember the rankings all these years later, though I have long since forgotten his precise reasons (and he had precise reasons) for those ranks.

I've written and deleted a few more hopeful sentences about Libya. Hope and dread, hope and dread; my heart goes out to the Libyans.

I guess I'll stop now.