It's a good day to be a blogger in America. In Iran, not so much.
A young man my age has been imprisoned for speaking his mind online. (Allah forbid.) He could be whipped, sentenced to life in prison...maybe even executed, if his "crimes" are found to be just that horrible.
It troubles me very deeply that well into the twenty-first century, a teenage boy still can't express himself. He can't tell people what he's reading, what his life is like, or even who his friends are.
But if this young man has anything to be grateful for, it is that he is not a woman. If a female blogger were to be imprisoned, I cringe to think what might happen to her.
Iran isn't real crazy about having women who know how to read.
Can't we do something?
In the mid- to late-1800s, a revolution occurred in America that changed its destiny forever. Poor children of farmers became literate. They learned how to think for themselves, how to back up their arguments. America's children became powerful.
And this is what needs to happen in Iran.
Now, I don't claim to know anything about life in Iran, but I believe I can claim to have a decent grasp of history and how it repeats itself, as the saying goes. And so, if you teach the children of Iran to read and teach them there is more than one way to be "right" and sometimes nobody is "right," well, then...we've got a little bit of a healthier world on our hands.
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