I had just turned nine years old when the Iran hostage crisis began.
For over a year it was the topic of dinner table conversation. Often we would eat dinner on trays in front of the television. If I remember right, the station we watched for national news had a little ticker on the lower right hand side of the screen which showed how many days we were into the crisis.
Radio stations started playing "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" multiple times a day in honor of the hostages, and everyone in my neighborhood in Montgomery, Alabama put in extra work to maintain nice looking ribbons around their trees (I don't remember if they were oak or not). When the rain and whatnot had made the ribbon too frayed you had to cut it with some scissors and put a new one up.
The Iranians were uniformly portrayed as barely human in their fanaticism (often in contrast with our "moderate Muslim" allies in Saudi Arabia) and I never got a satisfactory explanation as to why they might want to take the hostages (google "President Mossadegh" and "Savak"). This didn't bother me too much at the ages of 9 or 10. They were bad guys and we were good guys, and the whole thing was intensely humiliating day after day, especially after the failure of Operation Eagle Claw in April of 1980.
And then, in November of that year, Ronald Reagan was elected. As a six year old I had voted for Jimmy Carter in my first grade class election, because I liked his smile. In the months of nightly news coverage following Eagle Claw, my ten year old self had learned a lesson. I even had a Ronald Reagan t-shirt. And I was right to wear that shirt, for he was so powerful that a mere twenty minutes after his inagurural speach, it was announced the hostages had been freed.
The hostages are free! The hostages are free!
For some reason I was at home that day and my mom was at work. With shaking hands I dialed, for the first time, her phone number at the prison (long story for another post).
"Mom! Mom! Mom!" Hyperventilation. "They. They. They! Freed! The." Hyperventilation. "Hostages!"
Long pause.
"It's all on the T.V. The hostages are free! The hostages are free!"
An unnerving amount of silence, and then. "Jon. You are not to call me at work unless it's important." Click.
It was a rather rude way to be pulled out of the cave and into sunlight, and I think I'm still grappling with how something can be a national obsession and yet not be "important." But one thing is for sure; human beings are simply not to be taken seriously. Just look at what we say, and then look at what we do. Would you take someone like that seriously? Honestly.
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