As America heads into the third Thanksgiving since the pandemic, a lot of things look like they’re back to normal:
Families are gathering around the table together and travel is forecast to be at its highest level in decades. Even the anticipated turkey shortage didn’t materialize, according to the USDA. After three long years of socially distanced holidays, we’re back to merely worrying about who might . . . ruin the feast by shouting at each other about politics. . .
Look closely, though, and there’s one thing that’s strikingly different from how Thanksgiving worked in the long-lost world of November 2019 — and it’s something to be grateful for: A lot of stores will actually close.
Back in the before times, one of the long-festering trends of the fourth weekend of November was the steady encroachment of that bigger holiday scheduled for December. Not long ago, Black Friday didn’t even have a name; by 2019, the signature kickoff event of the Christmas shopping season had bled into Thanksgiving itself.
It’s barely Halloween. The ball won’t drop in Times Square for another two full months, and more good books will surely appear before the year ends. But I already know: My favorite novel of 2022 is Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.”
The gap between the freedoms and opportunities enjoyed by the system’s affiliated elite and those of ordinary Iranians has never been so wide — and never have so many people expressed so much anger about it.
This fundamental repudiation of the system is what makes these protests so different from other restive moments in Iran’s recent past: In 1999, students demonstrated against the closing of a reformist newspaper; in 2009, millions marched against an allegedly rigged presidential election, demanding the ascent of different leaders within the system. Today, many despair of any prospect for change and feel a sense of bleak, collective loss.
The [Iranian] singer Shervin Hajipour summarized that pain in his song “Baraye,” or “For.” The lyrics, sewn together from protesters’ tweets and offering reasons for their protests, often wafts from cars and balconies across Tehran now, especially in the evenings:
For my sister, your sister, our sisters For the renewal of rusted minds For embarrassed fathers with empty hands For our longing for an ordinary life … For the students and their future For this forced paradise For the bright ones in prisons … For woman, life and freedom
One morning, I met Niloofar, a translator and graphic artist (most Iranians work more than one job these days to get by) in her mid-30s who remembered the ferocity of the full-fledged crackdown in 2009. Two days before we met, she had joined the crowds gathering in Sattarkhan, a neighborhood in central Tehran, which had become one of the capital’s most restive areas. She was heartened by the women in head scarves she saw among the protesters, women who choose to wear hijab by choice but had come out to support a movement against its imposition. “It’s no small thing to come out into the street,” she said. “You risk your life, arrest, injury. It’s like a war out there.”
Niloofar saw the decision of these women to oppose the government as critical, a feature that makes this movement, even if smaller by numbers, broader than anything Iran has experienced since 1979. In turn, protesters are careful to avoid insulting religion, mindful that despite society’s steady shift toward secularism, tolerance for individual freedom in belief is at the very core of their demands. “Islam is one thing; the system is another,” Niloofar said. “Maybe this system has damaged people’s piety most of all. And maybe secularism is the answer to our problems. But no one is saying it’s time to say that yet.”