The situation with the protests over the election results in Iran have been fascinating. And captivating. Not necessarily in a good way, but like  car crash, you can’t look way. And you’re hopeful that things will turn out okay.

I work with a Persian woman. A few days ago, re: the situation in her home country, she asked me, “Doesn’t this shock you?”

I said, “No. I’m from California.”

from here.

“It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be. We respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran, which sometimes – the United States can be a handy political football, or discussions witht he United States [can be]. Having said all that, I am deeply toubled by the violence I have seen on television. I think that the democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent, all of those are universal values, and need to be respected. And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, they are rightfully troubled.”

-President Obama, with some real talk. People are criticizing him for not getting more involved, but he’s got a hell of a point.

One of the green party supporters of Mir Hossen Mousavi helping an injured Iranian police officer out of danger during the escalated violence of the riots.

I saw this floating around on tumblr yesterday:

Change your twitter settings t say you are in the Tehran timezone, and chng your location to Tehran.

Iranian censor are filtering by these settings to find dissidents, by doing this you can make things  bit more difficult for them.

Some further reading:

State Dept. to Twitter: keep site up in Iran.

Observing social unrest online at 32,000 feet.

Iran’s day of anguish.

Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic.

Revolutionary guards arrested in Iran.

McCain unhinged.

An amazing collection of photos from the riots on flickr and from here.

The candidates in this past election:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (top left), the current president who claimed victory in the recent election, though many people believe that the challenger, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, is the actual winner with Ahmadinejad actually coming in third. The sad thing is: It probably doesn’t matter since, despite what the people want, the Ayatollah is going to decide everything.

One of the people who feel that Ahmadinejad lost was Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi. And here’s an interesting picture:

How does your vote count go down as the votes being counted?

The saddest part is that our best, our most realisic hope, is that the violence stops soon and that people aren’t hurt too bad by whatever comes from the outcome. A massive regime change in Iran? Not likely.

Reading the latest updates on the protests yesterday, my co-worker held back tears and mentioned that she has a sister living in Iran, and that while she knows that her sister is currently safe and is avoiding this danger at all costs, she’s still understandably terrified for her.

Then she got a phone call from her family: the son of a friend of a friend of the family had been killed in one of the protests in Tehran. She didn’t know him, but the connection had just gotten that much more serious to her, housed even deeper inside her. Her homeland, her family, even people she had only heard of before. Everything was connected in this.

After a while of not saying anything, she finally said, “but maybe some good will come of this.”

I asked her what she meant and she told me that of course she didn’t want anyone to die, or to suffer, like people were doing now, but she didn’t want people to be in this situation again. You never want to have to need a revolution, but maybe some good will come out of it. I don’t want to use a cliche about breaking a few eggs to make an omelette, so I’ll leave it at something even simpler and perhaps more cliched: It’s never wrong to hope for a better tomorrow.