I was once the wine.

In my Eng. 101 class we had to read Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran," which discussed a group of female students who met in a secret classroom to discuss literature in a setting where the can shed their head-coverings and their inhibitions.

In the class, we started to discuss all the freedoms of Americans, and that got me wondering: What is worse, the blatant atrocities of the then Islamic Republic of Iran, or the subversive prejudice hate-and-fear tactics of the American government?

I mean, sure, they're openly persecuted, by the police state and the Islamic Legalism, but not by the people. In America the hate is drilled into the people by the media and suddenly it's no longer the government but the people that are the assholes, the prejudiced. The government plants the seed and it germinates into 1940's German lynchings and Japanese internment camps to perhaps protect them from the hatred of the average American. I can imagine that the average American woman, since "That Fateful Day," has had their level of hatred to both Middle-Easterns and Muslims. But an average Iranian woman hates the government, and they just force it upon their people.

Well? What would you rather have?