"Silence is Violence"

I have learned that silence has a texture. It is not empty. It is padded, deliberate, curated for comfort. It feels like a room where everyone has agreed to whisper so no one has to acknowledge who is missing.

Being Iranian in the diaspora means you grow up fluent in that texture. You learn early how people’s faces change when you say where you’re from. The flicker of curiosity followed by confusion followed by a quiet relief when the conversation moves on. You learn which parts of yourself are acceptable to share at dinner parties and which ones make people stare at their wine glasses like they suddenly remember an email they forgot to send.

I have spent my whole life watching causes become trends. I do not say that cynically. I say it with the weariness of someone who keeps hoping the trend will mature into something sturdier. Something that can survive complexity. Something that does not evaporate the second it becomes uncomfortable or hard to explain.

There is a particular kind of person who knows exactly what to say when the moral math is simple. They have the fonts, the slogans, the language down to a science. They know when to post, what to repost, how to signal urgency without disrupting their own sense of stability. Their care is real, I think, but it is also rehearsed. It arrives already formatted.

Iran does not arrive that way. Iran shows up loud and contradictory and historically inconvenient. Iran asks you to hold multiple truths at once. That the government is brutal. That the people are not their government. That women are resisting in ways that do not translate cleanly into Western frameworks. That rage and love can coexist in the same breath. That freedom is not always photogenic.

Supporting Iranians requires curiosity instead of certainty. It requires listening longer than feels efficient. It requires admitting you might not understand everything immediately. And I think this is where a lot of people quietly exit the conversation. Not with malice, but with a shrug disguised as overwhelm.

What makes it painful is not that everyone cannot carry everything. It is that so many people claim to care about justice as an identity, until justice stops being flattering. Until it stops offering the dopamine hit of approval. Until it asks for consistency instead of performance.

I notice how quickly language disappears. How captions dry up. How people who once insisted silence was complicity suddenly develop a philosophy about private concern. I notice how grief becomes something you are supposed to experience quietly if it does not fit the dominant narrative of the moment. I notice how Iranians are expected to be endlessly patient, endlessly grateful for scraps of attention, endlessly calm while our families are terrified.

There is a specific loneliness that comes with watching people who pride themselves on awareness choose not to be aware. It feels like being told, without words, that your pain is too inconvenient to engage with properly. Too nuanced. Too much work.

I do not want anyone to be perfect. I do not want a gold star system for caring. I want honesty. I want people to admit when their activism is shaped by aesthetics and algorithms instead of actual solidarity. I want them to notice how quickly they disengage when a cause does not come with a script.

Because performative activism does not just fail the people it ignores. It teaches everyone else that justice is seasonal. That attention is transactional. That if you wait long enough, the world will move on and you can return to brunch.

Meanwhile, Iranians do not get to move on. We carry history in our bodies. We carry fear in our phone calls home. We carry the weight of explaining ourselves over and over again to people who believe they are informed because they have learned the correct vocabulary.

What I am asking for is not louder voices, but steadier ones. Not more posts, but more presence. Not certainty, but willingness. I am asking people to interrogate why they show up so passionately for some struggles and go quiet for others. To question whether their politics are rooted in values or visibility.

Solidarity should not require a branding guide. It should not dissolve the second it stops being legible. It should be able to sit with mess, with contradiction, with stories that do not resolve neatly by the end of a slideshow.

I am tired of feeling like my anger needs to be polite to be valid. I am tired of translating my grief into something palatable. I am tired of watching people confuse comfort with morality.

Iran needs acknowledgment. Attention that does not flinch. Care that does not disappear when the conversation gets hard. A willingness to stay even when there is no applause for doing so.
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If justice is only practiced when it is easy, it is not justice. It is theater. And I think I am finally brave enough to admit that I am exhausted from sitting in the audience.