NickydocDocs

So yeah.  I was following a particularly funny virtual conversation on twitter last night, and something caught my attention--it was a hashtag (#) denoting the recent Iranian election (#iranelection).  I was vaguely aware of the election having taken place, but hadn't followed it too closely.  I searched the hashtag, and happened upon some students that were (verifiably) tweeting from the University of Tehran which, as it turns out, was pretty much under attack.  The mainstream news media hadn't really picked up on it yet, but there it was;  tales of tear gas, beatings, and militia intervention, told through the terrified and jaw dropping tweets of some students under siege.  The brief communiques of 140 characters or less were some of the most gripping moments I've ever experienced in my experience with the internet.  

To be candid, I suppose I had somehow (tragically) bought into the whole 'axis of evil' thing.  Somehow, I had gotten it into my mind that the entire country was chock full of america-hating terrorists bent on my own personal destruction.  I had become lazy in my thinking, forgetting that, although the ideal, a government rarely accurately represents its people (particularly dictatorships).  I have read Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago' and Hannah Arendt's 'The Origin's of Totalitarianism' with awe and learning.  In fact, those two books, perhaps more than any others, shaped my view of the world.  I found myself thinking about those two treatises while following the tweets of those oppressed students, scared and breathless in their dorm rooms in Tehran.  It also reminded me of the egocentricity inherent to villages, states, and nations.

I was awarded a Watson Fellowship from Centre College, allowing for post-graduate study abroad.  I was still undecided about medical school, and thought I'd take a couple of years off.  I applied for this fellowship and, to my surprise, ended up being one of 75 national recipients.  I went to South Africa to study the allocation of healthcare to black population under apartheid, to St John's College at Oxford to study the National Health Service architecture, and to Israel to document the allocation of healthcare to the Palestinians in the West Bank.  It was an amazing, albeit heartbreaking experience.  I remember being befriended by a pair of twin Israeli soldiers, 'Hod' and 'Natti'.  Of course everyone in Israel has to serve some time in the military--conscription or, in the american vernacular, 'the draft'.  I happened to be in Israel during the first intifada (the first Palestinian uprising, starting in some of the refugee camps and ultimately spilling over into east Jerusalem, where I happened to be living).

The trip started off a bit shaky:  I had flown into Ben Gurion airport late one night from London, and had forgotten to check in with the american embassy the next day.  A couple of days later, I called my parents who had, by then, contacted the State Department and were in the process of walking their passport applications through, and were working with the State Department to hop a flight to Tel Aviv.  My mother answered the phone, and burst into tears.  Then she tore into me like a hot knife through butter.  Times were...fragile.

At any rate, I was sitting with Hod and Natti one late evening in Jerusalem.  I had the candid curiosity that the young (or young at heart) are heir to only, and asked the twins if either of them had killed a man.  Natti looked at me with these incredibly green eyes and said, in somewhat broken english, 'I suppose yes, but have no memories of seeing them fall.  I DO remember shooting a young Palestinian boy in the stomach with two plastic bullets.'  Just like that.  Not so much as a flinch.  I was drinking bottled water.  It's an odd memory to have, but I remember it like it was yesterday.  I had poured the bottled water into a drinking glass, and the waiter in the street cafe' had brought me a lemon.  When Natti told me about the shooting, I literally sucked a lemon seed down the wrong way.  After a brief choking fit, I tried to regain my composure.

I tried to remain neutral in my line of questioning, feeling immediately morally superior.  In retrospect, I was spinning questions out like thick knotted rope, giving him enough line to hang himself.  After some questions and remarks, the story was this:  The brothers were dispatched to quell a violent outburst somewhere in the occupied territories.  Natti was across this small alley from his brother, Hod.  Natti looked up, and a young Palestinian boy was on the balcony above, getting ready to drop a rock (weighing about 20 pounds) directly onto his brother's head.  Natti had a gun loaded with plastic bullets in his hand and reflexively shot the kid in the gut.  Twice.  My arrogance and certainty slipped away like tears in the rain.

I thought of that conversation while following those students on Twitter.  I forget sometimes.  I forget how easy it is to judge--to judge a people, a movement, or a country; how easy it is to judge a religion, a set of feelings, or a brand of loyalty.  These Iranian kids, like the Israeli soldiers who befriended me, are all just trying to get by.  That story, incidentally, lead to my first published poem.  Without dipping into the maudlin, it is reprinted below.

This Dream, My Urn

I count gray hairs, then think I could be bald instead.

When my hands are unyielding, I remember my father's hands--

coarse as sandpaper, stained yellow with smoke.

He used to tell me,

'A man cries when he has no shoes

until he sees a man who has no feet.'

I am learning from

this dream, my urn 

that, in the end,

it is not the bones

alone,

that tell whom you have truly been.

Nick Kouns