You Have NO Idea

The more pictures I email to the States of my daily life here in Iran the more requests I get.
And so I send them; emails packed with images captured with a sad little Nokia cel - sure to take forever to download, but people want to know, they want to see.
They are amazed at how lovely it is here, how modern, how exotic and yet sort-of familiar, how very normal it all is.

One friend wrote me recently, in response to the last batch of pictures:
"...this is amazing - it's like a view we NEVER see - all we see are the burkhas, you know? Iran seems so...healthy compared to Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Afghanistan..."

I guess it's no coincidence - the United States hasn't been here for the past 30 years.
THAT should tell you something.

The reason all you see on the news is dry, sandy, desert, city streets overrun with people burning an American flag, women dressed head to toe in black with only their eyes visible, and bio-hazard hooded scientists in white suits carrying unidentified (yet somehow very dangerous at the same time?) materials in a mysterious lab is because that's exactly what you're supposed to see.
You've been watching the same feeds over and over again for the past decade.
Face it, there is no news out of Iran or about Iran in western media, unless it's bad news.

Iran has been mystified and villified to the point of ludicrous.
Exotic it is, but insane and third-world it is definitely not.

However un-PC my views may be - they are, at least, my own and not some dusty old Beta running on channel 4.
And thank God for that.

Another friend wrote, in response to this picture - not particularly notable except for its sunny-day South Iran countryside beauty, "It could be 'Anystreet USA'."
And that's the point.