Friday, April 1, 2011

Counting my blessings...

The United States is only one small place in this great big world that we all live in, and many of us here cannot understand the idea of not automatically having certain rights or freedoms. These include things that seem so basic to us, such as worshiping and believing as we individually choose, as well as the right to choose to not believe in anything if our hearts and minds don’t guide us that way. Since some people in other countries may not have the same freedoms and rights that we have here in America, we have to be careful not to take these for granted. Instead, especially when we are thinking on the worldwide scale, we should view these kinds of rights as advantages. Even here in America, these freedoms were not always granted to all people. My great grandparents lived in a society where the color of their skin and their ethnicity prevented them from basic freedoms that include, but are in no way limited to, marriage, owning property, or learning to read and write. As much as we may complain about conditions of equality in America today, I’m sure that my grandparents and great grandparents would view the rights that my children and I enjoy today as an advantage over what they had to deal with in their time.

Nafisi is from a community where women are not just expected to cover their faces with a veil to honor a local religious tradition; women are mandated by law to do so. This seems to be a theme that flows throughout the book and is of great important to the plot as well as Nafisi’s character. I wonder what my outlook on life and freedom would be like if I lived in such a society where my rights and freedoms were restricted because of my gender. I can at least comprehend certain restrictions that are based on race and ethnicity, as these are familiar to me from listening to the lessons of recent history that I receive from media and older family members. However, legal restrictions based on gender are not exactly the same as those that are based on a person’s race, and this experience is not familiar to me at all. It is very difficult for me as a male, even as a Black man in America, to understand a female’s perspective of discrimination, which carries different a stigma than race. Men here in this nation, as well as those in other countries around the world, are in positions of power where there are no laws that restrict us based on our gender. While it is preferred and somewhat expected for a man to wear a beard in certain Islamic countries, it is not a law that has a punishment if it is not respected. This is expected for religious and traditional reasons, the same as the wearing of the veil, but no law has been passed by women against men for any reason. In the same way that my foreparents would view my rights as an advantage, I must be careful to not take for granted my own level of freedom as an American male, and realize that I have an advantage over folks in many other countries, especially the females in those countries.

2 comments:

  1. I takes all kinds of people and beliefs to make up this old world. We are constanly pulled into each others lives to point out and enlighten each other. The lonely walk can be very unsatisfying. Each one of us is the most important thing in our sphere and though we seem to grow, I cannot imagine being anyone else, nor can I imagine anyone really understanding me and the walk it took to get here. I have no idea where to turn next or what lies ahead and for the first time in life, this really bothers me.
    I have always enjoyed being able to do and believe as I please, but it seems as though a great big wrath is coming, composed of a thousand bad dreams and terrible nightmares that we all have had a part in creating, that we all will have a part in tasting until the plate is dry. Even now as we stand idly by and let our freedoms become others prisons we seem child-like in the sense that we know we are doing something wrong, just by standing quietly by.
    The laws by which Nafisi had to live seem easy compared to the task we will have to face in the future. Our fate is not so cut and dried. There are no defined and definite consequences to the actions or lack of actions we will face and be forced to choose from in our futures. All of the women who hid behind the veil remind me of us now, protected by only our ignorance and attendance in some reading group will be mandatory…very soon….

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  2. We are lucky or blessed to even have the rights and opportunities to even say something about issues like what you grandparents went through. Situation like those really needs to be noticed and taken cared of. But people here always take our freedom for granted. Some countries don’t even have the rights to complain like we do. People make “christian prayers before meetings” such a big deal. They go to court just to have the “rights” to say prayers before city council meetings or to eliminate the prayers. You know how much money court fees cost and who pays for them? Those type of situations that can be fixed without any huge supreme court. There’s a simple solution for that; for whatever religion you are part of, pray quietly so that you don’t offend or isolate another person with a different religion. We are lucky enough to even have the freedom to choose whatever religion we want and not have a “government tied religion.”
    The whole gender thing has been and issue, or still is an issue. But because of right to speech, women were able to create movements to spread the immorality of it. Some countries don’t have that rights, and it’s really sad that they can’t do anything about it.

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