Re:An Open Letter to Google and Apple: Stop Hindering Irania...
by DoreenMichele on Friday June 28, 2019 @06:53AM
(#20303073)
I'm not talking about patriotism. I'm talking about the Iranian view that America came into their country to interfere with their self determination, they kicked us out and we are still interfering with their self determination via sanctions -- like an abusive parent that continues to stalk an adult child who fled home.
Given that the US gives Iranian Nationals no means to get free of the black mark against them for simply having been born there, they don't have to feel any loyalty whatsoever to their country to be intensely against what the US is doing to them.
The best thing us outsiders can do to help them out is to provide them with an unlimited access to the information, not the opposite. The amount of young people that are willing to sacrifice their own chance at a good life for something as meaningless as self-determination can only be made smaller by making the education more accessible.
In principle, there's nothing wrong with being patriotic. In practice, there's very little to be patriotic about when your national identity pulls you down and becomes another hurdle that you have to deal with -- a hurdle that other young people don't have simply because they were born somewhere else.