Social Studies

I want to give props to my 9th grade Social Studies teacher Mr. Eric Schott.  Not only was he a cool guy who could quote the Pixies and played the Dead Kennedys in class, he also was the first teacher I ever had who was able to present the rather stilted and biased curriculum of the American Educational system as though there was more than one side to the story.  He taught Comparative World Cultures and a class called Current Affairs (this was before Clinton so that didn't sound quite so sordid).  It was 1988, the Soviet Union was on the ropes, the Berlin wall actually came down, within a year and David Hasselhoff became known as a singer loved by Germans everywhere.  O the times they were a changin'.
Up until that point, I had been presented with a historical and political narrative, wherein, western culture, particularly American Christianity was the apex of human society, and everyone else were either benighted savages or sinister communists bent on killing the very idea of God and in the process also crushing the human soul.
At this particular moment in history the USA and the USSR were still sort of locked in the 50 year detente of the cold war and fingers were on buttons.  That was about to change, but everyone was pretty much skeptical that something with such high stakes and that had been so intractable for so long could just, all of the sudden, not be a thing anymore.  We had a bad guy.  We had, what they refer to in literature as a foil, a Moriarty to our Holmes, a Lex Luther to our Superman, you get the idea.  As it turns out, our enemy wasn't quite as together as we thought and it turns out that he was the one with feet of clay or a glass jaw or whatever metaphor you like for a fatal flaw.
The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the nightmare of nuclear annihilation was pretty big news, and we talked a bit about that, but what I want to give Mr. Schott big ups for was the fact that he also taught us about Islam.  Granted, we got the 1980s version, which was that there were basically two kinds of Muslim: Sunni and Shia (or Shiite, which was an endless source of vulgar humor for 14 year olds).  At that point, the Sunni were the good guys and the Shia were the bad guys.  We were supporting Saddam Hussein in his heroic battle against Ayatollah Khomeni, and we were big fans and suppliers to the Mujahadin in Afghanistan because those scrappy little dudes were taking on the mighty Red Army, and actually winning.  One of those "heroic" commie fighters was a young Saudi named Osama Bin Laden (not that that meant anything yet).
Mr. Schott was rather careful not to let us buy that story though.  He presented the history of the two groups within Islam and pointed out that actually the Shia were a rather drastic minority, historically persecuted by the Sunni, and that Iran, big bad Iran (which under no circumstances should ever be pronounced Eye-Ran), the ancient Persian Empire Iran, which was in no means to be trifled with Iran, was very much defined by their desire to be left well enough alone.
They are surrounded by Sunnis who don't like them, their theocracy is very much threatened by western values, and everyone, everywhere is always trying to tell them what to do.  You have to understand that, to a 9th grader, this is radical stuff, because you understand how that feels.  I became very sympathetic to Iran, not in the "gee I would like to go there" sort of way, but at least in the way I felt bad for some of the poor kids who were always getting picked on for not having the "right" jeans or sneakers.  I also understood the feeling sort of first hand, because I was sort of growing into a bit of a misfit identity myself.  The news just presented Iran as a threat, as an international bad actor, as a human rights catastrophe.  I know, all of that is true, they really are a bit of a spaz, but you need to understand why before you go rounding up the bully mob.
I really don't want Iran to get a nuke anymore than Bibi Netanyahu, for the same reason I wish Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn't manage to get guns.  But I'm pretty sure as long as we keep treating them like pariahs, they're only going to want to hate us more.
Here is something they share with the Russians, which I don't think Americans or Westerners really ever understand: the capacity to suffer.  I learned a lot about the Russians from reading Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn.  I know that our posture towards them during the Cold War, was probably the single biggest reason why the thing went on as long as it did.  As long as the Kruschevs of the world could convince the long suffering Russians that the USA was more abhorrent than the privations visited on them by Communism, the stoic Russian people would just suck it up and take it.  They're really amazing like that.
Iran has a similar character.  They have been alone so long they have lost many of the social skills and diplomatic instincts that we hear so much about in the Biblical narratives about Persian rulers like Cyrus and Xerxes, who at one point were hailed as actual messiahs by the Jews who had been exiled into Babylon (Iraq).  In a very real sense, the United States is sort of like a high school freshman on the scene of global politics (a big strong freshman, but way awkward).
We stumble our way through some sort of relationship (if you can even call it that) with these ancient cultures, with ethnic and religious grudge matches that go back to a time when the only great Empires on this continent were called Lenape, Aztec and Mayan.
The problem that we have is that we don't care to understand these ancient stories, we simply judge by who does what we want them to do, and who is more or less friendly to our interests.  Got oil?  You can be our friend.  Willing to sign our treaties and not break them (and not get too mad when we do)?  You're reasonable people.  Angry about poverty and economic injustice?  Sorry, we don't like angry people.  Threatened by lax moral standards and being surrounded by all sorts of licentious imagery and behavior?  Well then you must be a fundamentalist extremist, we can't even talk to you.
We are so very ignorant about the cultures and attitudes of people who are different from us, and the world is going global faster than we would care to admit. It's becoming too dangerous to continue to blunder about in our freshman fugue.  We need to learn, and we need to engage, and we need to stop letting ignorance and fear run us.