In a book I just read for a YA lit discussion group at my school, this passage really struck me:
My Wednesdays are worse than my Tuesdays, my Tuesdays way worse than
my Tuesday of a week before. Which means every tomorrow is going to
be worse than every today. Why feel sorry for myself today when
tomorrow's bound to be worse? It's a hell of a philosophy, but it's
all I've got.
I found myself--because I can't get it out of my mind, I suppose--thinking of events in Iran this weekend, the clashes between the demonstrators and the Basiji paramilitary police and the deaths of innocents like the 27-year-old philosophy student, Neda, whose final moments were caught on video and of whom I wrote yesterday. And I wonder what right I EVER have to feel sorry for myself. What right do any of us have?
The book in question, written by Susan Beth Pfeffer, is called Life As We Knew It. Narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl, it tells the harrowing story of the aftermath of an astronomical catastrophe: a huge asteroid strike that knocks the moon out of its orbit and too close to Earth, leading to climatic chaos and mass death here.
I don't know the accuracy of the science and I don't really care, and to be honest the book could be better written. But that passage resonates with me. When the teenage narrator, who by this point has lost almost everything and everyone and is facing what she is sure is her own death within months if not weeks, writes these words in her journal, she is articulating something that I think is beyond profound.
"Why feel sorry for myself when tomorrow's bound to be worse?"
Too many of us wallow in the pain of the moment, whether it is derived from our political beliefs or our personal relationships or what have you. I am no exception; it's easy to begin to believe that the world is coming apart at the seams when events in your life seem to be conspiring against you. But when I close my eyes and see that video play over and over, watch that young woman's eyes drift up toward the camera, her soul crying to be counted as her body gives itself up to her God, and when I see the photos of beaten and bloodied people fighting for their rights or the video of people who had been hanged for standing up for freedom, or the endless videos of fighting in the streets, I know that my own problems don't hold a candle.
It seems a very pessimistic philosophy to say that, when things are at their worst, they might just get...worse. But everything is relative. When we thing that things are at their "worst," we are fooling ourselves. We have no real clue, any more than the inhabitants of Pfeffer's imagined world did when they gathered together to watch in awe as an asteroid hit their moon, unaware that the event they were celebrating would end life as they knew it.
Neda has become a martyr for her country's new revolution thanks to viral video despite the fact that, according to her fiancé, she was not even all that political.
It seems that Mr. Mousavi's supporters are trying to portray Neda as one of his supporters. This is not so. Neda was incredibly close to me and she was never supportive of either two groups. Neda wanted freedom and freedom for all.
When she awoke on Saturday morning, her life was unsettled by events that were not of her creation. Crowds were in the streets. Basiji were attacking innocents at night, pulling them from apartments and beating them. The Ayatollah had decreed yet again that the incumbent had "won" the election he had so clearly stolen and further had ordered his citizens not to demonstrate on Saturday, an order even he surely knew would be violated. Things in Iran were, to put it mildly, unstable. But neither she nor anyone who knew her ever imagined that she would not live to see the day end. Things can always get worse.
"It's a hell of a philosophy, but it's all (we've) got."
This is not, ultimately, a philosophy for pessimists. Like the book's young protagonist, we must all begin to understand that, no matter how difficult our lives may become, we need to continue striving, continue searching for those things worth celebrating, continue trying to effect the changes that need to be made. Cockeyed optimism at best, perhaps, but we all need to hold on to hope in hard times. We need that hope especially then.
Emily Dickinson said,
Hope is the thing with feathers;
That perches in the soul;
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
For Neda and for the brave citizens of Iran, I pray. I don't even know if I believe in a God, but I pray. I pray that they find, in the end, that their actions this week have meaning, that their country undergoes meaningful political change, that finally, finally, the good people of Iran can with heads held high join the world community. I pray that the darkest times do indeed portend the coming dawn.
And I pray that Neda, whose name in Persian means "voice," will indeed be the "tune without the words" that will ring out loud and clear, and never, never stop, as a reminder to us all.
**UPDATE: clarified philosophy a bit