Claim: In order to feel as though we better understand another culture which we know nothing about, we sometimes unknowingly make our view of them (our frames) incredibly small and vague.
So I was incredibly interested in the part of the graphic novel Persepolis that we read the other day and thought that I would try to see what else there was out there about Iran and Iranians as far as blogs go. I stumbled across this blog http://land-of-persia.blogspot.com/ and only had time to watch the first video (yes, it is a blog with videos containing writing and pictures) due to procrastination, but right off the bat, many of my misconceptions were changed. First of all, I had always thought of many of the Middle Eastern countries to be really dry and hot all the time and NEVER having snow. I also for some reason never thought that the people and history of Iran would be in any way shape or form progressive, now or any time in the past. I was wrong! There was evidence of religious freedom equality between men and women in the work place, and hell, they even invented poker!
I was enjoying myself watching the video, and then something totally changed my mood. I saw that many of the Iranian people, despite police trying to disperse the groups, spent much time after 9/11 mourning. There are pictures of them standing with candles at night for the victims of the attacks. The images made me feel incredibly sad. Not so much for the memory of 9/11, but for the fact that I never knew they cared. And then I started thinking, well why exactly as a little 4th grader did I not know that they cared? Because I was never told or introduced to the idea that people in the Middle East (for that is always how I learned to classify them in my mind) cared. And why was I never told? Probably because our media is shit and as Americans we rarely seek out what reality and the truth is on our own? Is it a cultural thing where somewhere down the road our ancestors decided that we should care about such things, and so it was not taught to seek out the truth and have a wider view and openness to what we do not know??
It is this dilemma which infuriates me. I like to think of myself as an incredibly open and constantly in thought individual. I try to figure out the world around me, try to figure out why people are how they are, and until I watched this video, such a thing never occurred to me. I believe this is probably due to that fact that when I was first introduced to the stigma that goes along with the Middle East in general, I was quite young. So what other stupid frames have I not questioned yet due to what I have learned from school, media, and everyone around me? Why exactly are our frames so limited?
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