At the end of the trip to Iran, on the way to the airport Dr. Bronston expressed his beliefs about Iran based on his observations.
This is Bill Bronston and it’s the 15th of April and we’re in a very noisy van on our way to Tehran in order to continue through on to our Emirate’s air onto Dubai and onto our home after spending many many wonderful incredible days here. I’ve kept a log and in the log put in certain kinds of information and sort of the chronology in the specifics of the trip. I can then translate it to the photo albums that are really major product from my trip when I come home. Those photo albums probably 6 or 7, about 200 photographs and each one of them probably focused around each of the city that we visited and from that you know we have a permanent record. We can go back and refer our experiences here.
The trip has been very moving. First of all the avalanche of information and material and experiences and travels and things we’ve seen are just enormous and makes it because of their multidimensionality. Persia has such and extraordinary long history that not only are you looking at its face but each face has a very deep shadow of origin.
The most I think powerful impact on Lisa and I, my wife and I has been the experience with just everybody, the people here. There is a quality of warmth and sweetness and openness and generosity and accessibility that simply absolutely not available in the United States. Americans don’t have the kind of unthreatened simple immediate loving kind of openness to strangers, smiling at them, talking with them and the feedback that we’ve got from simply every person no exception throughout the entire trip has just been one of the most beautiful and moving experiences that really almost brings me to tears when I think about it. At the time when we were interacting with the people it was the just a sweet moment. It’s terribly moving because we don’t have this kind of beauty in our culture.
There’s a funny part that this is a world of white cars. Everybody has a white car and it is very very funny because in the world that we come from there is you know infinite range of different colors of machines.
The food here has been very difficult for me. Uniformly the range of food we expected to be here we did not find. The overwhelming majority of food stuffs here first of all very repetitive. to my palate made it very difficult for me to eat here. The rice is of course out of this word and the salads are wonderful and the barley soup which is universal you know ranges all the way from tomato based to creamy based we really loved but everything else has extremely strong flavor and very very savor from my palate, I prefer sweeter foods and foods that have fruit in them. We saw virtually no fresh fruits in the hotels an apples every once a while or watermelon but not the broad range of fresh foods. The other part of that and much much important is that we came from a world of almost exclusively processed chemicalized foods all packaged all corporate produced, all remote in terms of their source whereas here we were really in estate of maximum culinary detoxification because all the food here is fresh, everything is fresh, everything is cooked fresh and the value of that is simply incalculable in terms of health and wellbeing. We saw very very few overweight people here in Persia and the fact of the matter is that in the United States we have more than 50% of the country is clinically overweight, 30% of the children are morbidly obese and the implication in terms of health care in terms of appearance, style, attitude, awareness, consciousness that overweight kind of influences is just extraordinary compare to the unormal society and a fresh eating society that you have here in Iran This is the way people should be eating fresh food all the time, Farm to table.
Another interesting aspect is the almost complete lack of any kind of corporate entrepreneurism here, in difference to the universal presence of local entrepreneurial merchants and shopkeepers. You know the bulk of the economy that we saw as tourists were small businesses. Tiny little stalls in every bazar in every city and the individual stores on the streets. There’s a tremendous repetition of goods in any given area or in general, you know limited amount of variation but the fact of the matter is that the business model for the bulk of the people here is pre corporate and that I think is a very significant situation that unfortunately is going to be severely challenged When the situation normalizes and when multinationals and American corporations and European corporations take advantage of the extraordinary potential market here, the stuff that is for sale and the thing that move me the most were rugs.
The rugs here tell story, carry a human investment that’s so complex and so deep, so important, so beautiful that it’s hard to put words to it. You know on one end of the spectrum you have the fact that the rugs are really created as a reflection of the domes of the many mosques and shrines and the nexus between earth and heaven, the imagery, the magnificent designs, the unbelievable amount of labor, hand labor that goes into these rugs that are permanent art pieces for the whole world to enjoy that have such tremendous longevity because of the quality of their manufacture, hand manufacture, simply unbelievable. It’s been a long time since Persian rugs have been able to be exported from this country especially into the United States and the magnitude and the beauty just the sheer astounding beauty of the carpets that are here is something that thrills me more than anything. I’m a rug fanatic and be here to be able to just walk everywhere and every bazar and every shop with the kinds of products that the Persian community is producing, is a thrill, a total thrill.
We were very very impacted by the fact that this is a society that is so profoundly family oriented and everywhere we went, there were children, little kids, kids that were swaddling in the arms of their parents mother and father. and the absolute treasure upon treasure of the beauty of the children, their smiles, their eyes, their energy, they’re just exemplary children being raised in the exemplary families because of an exemplary culture.
The land in Iran is dry, arid and without vegetation. It’s really shocking and then the mountain you know brown, unvegetated with the beautiful snowcapped picks. When we drove through in the cities there is really a lovely commitment of blooming in everywhere flowers are planted everywhere artificially in every street, in every home there are trees and flowers that are just incredible and it’s part of the undaunted and unquenchable static loveliness of Persian culture of Iranian society, the fact that people put effort into gardening, civic gardening, gardening around the city, gardening in hotel where there are beautiful spaces with waters and fountains I mean it’s just such a lovely consistent commitment to growth and freshness and spring like kind of quality now we’re here in the spring and so I ‘m not sure how it’s going to like when it is 14 or 15 degrees. The time we’ve been here, the weather’s been cool and beautiful overcast in many instances that are provided a lovely breeze and cloud cover and then of course everything is blooming and it’s spring and it’s absolutely out of this world.
The other interesting thing that I noticed is just a tremendous amount of wall art here in every city, they are murals and paintings and decoration everywhere on every wall, Of course there is everywhere the images of supreme leaders and of course everywhere images of the martyrs which is totally understandable that is a sacrifice that took place here and the loss of life and the incredible in struggle in order to maintain integrity and national identity has been a great cost. The art capacity here is enormous and it’s constantly moving to express itself in a variety of ways.
Everybody have cellphone here. It is amazing and everybody is walking with their cellphones in their hands girls and boys, and grownups and everybody walk around holding the phones and continually communicating with them in one way or another. they’re on the phone, sending messages, Instagram, whatever it is when you think that this entire experience is less than 15 years old in the world, the implications to the society and culture and how this is going to essentially break open Iran to the international community specially driven by children, the children are being raised all of them from 2, 3, 4, 5 years old, 6 years old familiar with, comfortable with, looking for using cellphones as toys in every conceivable way is really the marker that this is a world that’s out of human control at some level. and it’s going we emerged in the way the whole global community is going to emerge in some kind of a common culture that it’s going to be digital. That’s going to be connected, that’s going to essentially bring in technology and experiences, information, knowledge, accessibility, transferability of that is unimaginable in the 20th century. We’ve undergone a revolution in the means of production and the world in the last two decades and the forces of production. The masses of the people that are utilizing these infinitely powerful tools for socialization and connection and intellect is going to change everything.