A majority of the nation doesn't even remember "The Shah." An entire generation has grown up with this repressive bullshit as the norm. A lot of the post-revolution troublemakers (i.e. the "I'm not down with this Islamic regime bullshit" crowd) were sent to the "front" as cannon fodder during the Iran-Iraq War, and that took care of those gripers--if they came back at all, they came back maimed and unable to cause any trouble for the ulema.
Kids today look through their parents' shit, and are shocked to find pictures of "Madar" in a mini-skirt and "Pedar" in a pair of tight bell-bottoms and a polyester shirt with three buttons opened, and a garish (real) gold medallion nestled in his hairy chest, taken at a Tehran nightclub-disco at a table littered with cigarettes and booze. Everyone's smiling and laughing, and no Vice and Virtue monitors are anywhere in sight. If they look closely, they'll see, in the background, uncle and auntie and that farty old elder who is always squawking at people to keep it down at the mosque on Friday night. If they keep digging, they'll find their parents' disco cassette tapes and those snapshots of the happy couple swimming together in skimpy bathing suits or skiing in tight fitting ski suits, not overseas, but right at home, in Teheran and the ski resorts to the north--in short, behaving like "regular" people who lived in the real world.
Until the whole world decides that a woman or a gay person or a religious minority matters as much as the well-larded dudes in the religious robes who hold the keys to the treasure house and have the ability to order the army out to crack heads and crack down, nothing will change.
I just can't worry about what people might think when I speak out. I'm not the President, nor am I a member of the Cabinet or Congress--I speak for myself, not "The West," whatever that means in this increasingly diverse society.
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