Youth In Anger, Youth In Love

Every season has an end. The youth movement in Iran, in the making for a decade and so visibly expressed a couple of years ago, is a turning point in the 150 years of struggle between modernity and tradition in Iran, between intolerance and acceptance, fanaticism and openness, discrimination and inclusion. It is the outcome of a nascent civil society that seeks to redeem the sins of its past generations. If their parents brought about the idiosyncrasy of a theocratic dictatorship in the second half of the twentieth century, they seek to usher their country into a tolerant, egalitarian and respectful society of future. Make no mistake, it was the youth that demanded their leaders, themselves relics of this regime, to address the question of equality of men and women, minority rights and personal freedoms in their agenda and not the other way around.

About one hundred years ago the Constitutionalist movement in Iran made the country the first outside the western world to have a constitution, limiting not only the role of monarchy but also removing clergy from interference with law. This civil movement is not any less significant in its impact on the future of that country. Iran now, perhaps for the first time, stands in a unique position in that progressive forces and groups constitute a majority whose desire to to build a free, civil society is in definace of a decrepit order.

Every season has an end and this youthful, vibrant mass longs to be part of the new century. The renaissance in thought the Iranian society has gone through in the last decade alone is quite astonishing. This youth in anger is a youth in love: angry at falling behind a world moving furiously fast, in love with the lofty ideals it pursues; angry at being represented by the lowest elements of the Iranian society and seeking to reclaim their rightful image and place in the world; angry at being marginalized but in love with taking centre stage in inventing a new society. They are the other face of their society no one had seen. They shout loud because they walk silent; they attract sympathy because their cause knows no borders. The wave of their thought is the colour of their heart and the redemption of their regrettable past is the conception of an as yet unborn society.

This youth in action is an ideal in motion, its goals elemental in essence, its demands universal in nature. They may lose this battle but there is no defeat for an idea whose time has come. They have become the undeniable force, the unstoppable future. This youth in anger is youth in love. They are the season to come, the morning tide of freedom. The anger will pass, but their love is here to stay.