There is no coincidence.  There will soon be an election in Iran.  You have an issue of Newsweek devoted almst entirely to Iran, "Everything You Think You Know About Iran Is Wrong."  You have this corresponding with an effort by CNN to show behind the scenes stories of life in Iran.  And you have an American President using language like "the Islamic Republic of Iran," and "Peace Be Upon Them."

There is no coincidence.  Not from afar.

These things were foretold to via the unpredictible, whirling torrents of experience.  Even far removed from the front lines in the Iran/U.S. cold war--I have experienced nonetheless something....

It is from this that I take not only pause, but also more importantly--I learn.

I was born one year before Black Friday, two years before the shah abandoned Iran and Khomeini began to lead, and three years before the 61 hostages were taken from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.  I have seen my entire lifetime filled with hate and mistrust and fear.  One wonders how a man my age in Iran might also have seen this lifetime as well.

I watched TV documentaries during the mid to late eighties which predicted a WWIII with Iran.  I let 1980s conservative rhetoric shape and inform, and color the palette--which painted an imaginary Iran inside my head.  I had never met an Iranian.  I have never been to any Islamic country, let alone Iran. 

The hinge was swung first on September 11th, 2001. 

I became changed.  The door swung shut.  I let my rules drop on the floor, let my best wishes be thrown away, and openly admit became a hater of all things Islamic.

But now, in the years since, most notably after 2007, something in me wondered if everything I had thought (in the world) was wrong; that perhaps a man could live and thrive until he discovers he is being used by those he enables.

I find myself questioning.  Questioning. 

I slowly began to learn and think again, for myself.  Nosce Te Ipsum.  Bizarre life is.  In some sort of strange catharsis, a person deeply moved and forever wounded by 9/11 to his core--has now come to find both nostalgia and Fernweh in the empty absence of a once palpable, ongoing "United We Stand" culture, lost after the failures of the last 8 years and the recognition of an unjustified war.  I actually find myself enamored and longing for more and more islamic culture, and a more human understanding and reckoning of what happened from both points of view.  Perhaps this sounds crazy, but it is true nonetheless.

The questions become all aligned in the same way; they all point to this--it is harder to defend a way that makes no real sense, and is more and more obviously based on poor intelligence.

I often wonder, how--to the ordinary muslim in Iran--the imaginary United States of America in his head has been slowly painted.  How the very real USA has stacked up next door in Iraq.  How he would imagine me, and what I feel towards him, and his country. 

So, what then? 

By gum, I think I understand myself.  It is now--that I wish, as I have wished, to purge my soul of the passions formerly felt and expressed in deference to 9/11.  How many times I have wondered how the german population felt after the camps of the dead were made public; if they realized their grave error in judgement despite their best intentions and former national pride.  I can't imagine.  Like so many well meant patriotic bleeding hearts, I thought I was being a good American.  I was wrong.

Whether we know it or not, that speech the other day was a hinge also.

I am nobody.  I am just another American white male over 30 who is unemployed.  But If I think it is important in my own life to understand my Iranian counterpart, and beyond that, his culture, his religion, his life--then there truly is hope for once for our two countries to respectively share in a new age of detante.

The time to engage Iran is now.  Now.  Now.