In 1978-79, my now-ex husband and I lived and worked in Iran, in the period leading up to and through the Iranian Revolution. We arrived in July, 1978, just a few weeks before martial law was declared; and we left in February, 1979, on the first flight of Americans evacuated out after the Revolution. My husband worked on a top-secret contract, teaching the Shah's military how to use certain classified communications intelligence equipment - even the name of the project was classified. I taught 4th grade in an Iranian school until the civil unrest became so bad that the schools shut down. As members of the intelligence community, we had the dubious distinction of being guarded by Savak, the Shah's secret police.

Iranian newspapers, radio and TV had long been censored. Over the course of the fall, this military censorship was on-again, off-again in a bewildering sequence. As a citizen of a "free" society, where the media at least make some attempt at being as free of partisan bias as possible, I found it fascinating to watch and listen to reporters, DJs and other media people struggle with a new and unaccustomed level of freedom of speech, one that might go away at any moment and be replaced by jail, or even torture. You could read between the lines in newspapers, where reporters were tentatively testing what they could get away with saying on any given day, that they couldn't have said previously. We Americans take the whole freedom-of-speech thing for granted. We don't realize that it's something we're trained for our whole lives. We're taught to think for ourselves from earliest childhood.

This was brought home to me very clearly one night that fall as I sat listening to a late-night DJ chatter nervously between songs. It was clear that he was very aware of the presence of a military censor in the studio - something inconceivable to us in the U.S. He mentioned having lived in the United States and being astonished at the way even small children were allowed to make their own decisions about things. He told of watching a father buy his son an ice cream from an ice cream vendor. The father held the boy up, showed him what was available and asked him what he wanted - something very natural to us. It would hardly occur to most Americans to do otherwise. Yet, the radio announcer went on to say, an Iranian father would never have asked the child what he wanted; he would simply have chosen something for him. That really made me realize how people are trained from infancy, either to make decisions for themselves, or to let others make decisions for them.

Having been brought up with this freedom to make our own decisions permeating every aspect of our daily lives, we Americans tend to think that we can just confer democracy on another country - poof! - by simply tossing out the brutal tyrants previously in control. But democracy isn't as simple as that. It's built on people knowing how to acquire information about an issue, evaluate it and make intelligent decisions about it; and about their being willing and able to take action based on their decisions. That, in turn, requires courage, and the confidence that you are likely to survive taking that action. Those things are particularly difficult for people brought up under systems where they are likely to be punished, or even killed, for speaking out against the system. So, I particularly salute the courage of a man like Nasim, who has lived under one of the most oppressive systems in the world, for not only speaking out, but also teaching others to do so. And it is my sincerest hope that the empowering, seductive, rabble-rousing technology of the Internet will make this increasingly possible throughout the world!