Images of the Iranian Uprising

"I received this from an anonymous Iranian student: “I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to be killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow!”

And she concludes: “I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so that they know we were not just emotional under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children.”

I bow my head to the youth of Iran, the youth that is open-eyed, bold and far more numerous than the near-beardless vigilantes. One such youth was Neda, whose music teacher, Hamid Panahi, was at her side when she died. I asked Panahi if she said anything after the bullet struck. “Yes,” he told me, “She said, ‘Mr. Panahi, I burnt.’"