Older People and the Coronavirus Vaccine — Aydin Areta / Continued

Iran today is described here as ranking seventy-fifth in the world in human wealth, below countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Oman and Bahrain. Who does not know that the reason is not poverty of human talent but the departure, over previous years, of five million Iranians, hundreds of thousands of them highly educated?

The most recent figure available in the source for the total wealth of Iranians outside Iran dates from fifteen years earlier and gives the striking estimate of 1.3 trillion dollars. According to a 2008 Iran Daily report cited here, nearly two hundred billion dollars of that was invested in Dubai, immediately beside Iran. A Stanford University study titled Iran 2040, published in 2020, is cited as estimating that more than 110,000 highly educated Iranian migrants were working with universities and research centres around the world, representing an unprecedented tenfold growth in the departure of highly skilled Iranians since 2000.

What compelled me to write these painful lines was a conversation several days ago with a dear elderly, white-haired person in Iran who told me of the hurt and suppressed anger endured while trying to receive a second dose of a coronavirus vaccine. At seventy-five years old, this person spent the entire night waiting in a vaccination queue and eventually returned home empty-handed. On the same day, news and videos circulating on social media showed older people being insulted while standing for hours in long lines with walking sticks, walkers and wheelchairs, only for many to return home without vaccination after an exhausting, risky, humiliating and fruitless wait. While reviewing the news I encountered a report that the police had apologised after footage showed mistreatment of an older person in a vaccination queue.

In countries where citizens’ rights are established, older people are treated as senior citizens and accorded high social respect. The minimum place where that respect should be evident, in recognition of the years they have contributed to the country in which they live, is the health system. Such treatment of older members of society is not merely a management disaster; it represents, in my view, the ultimate ethical collapse of the system responsible for managing public health.

The question is: in such circumstances, what can each of us do as a citizen? When falsehood penetrates the fabric of a society, it becomes important that the individuals within that society make an honest effort to live within the sphere of truth. None of us may be able to do everything, but there remains something each person can do in respect for truth. I have always believed in the precedence of culture and individuation over politics, and I still believe that a political system is not separate from the individual people who compose society.

What we dislike and condemn undoubtedly has roots in the psychological structures and behavioural patterns of our society. We will not reach positive transformation by ignoring these fundamental cultural problems and constructing only a simple binary separation between nation and state. At the same time, whatever our political beliefs, whether we are loyal to a political system or opposed to it, committed to change, inclined toward reform, or supportive of continuity, we must never remain silent before what endangers truth and honesty in our society.

Several days ago a dear friend, responding to something I had written earlier, sent me sentences referring to Václav Havel and his work The Power of the Powerless. I want to end this piece with my friend’s words:

“When I speak of living within the sphere of truth, naturally I do not have only conceptual intellectual products in mind, such as protests or collective letters by intellectuals. Any person or group who in any way rebels against being reduced to a plaything has, in fact, entered the sphere of living in truth.”

This rebellion against making truth into a plaything can be anything except silence: from letters written by intellectuals, to a citizen’s public speech at an official congress, to a representative speaking in parliament, or even artistic protest through painting, music or story. It does not matter how different citizens are in their political preferences. They can and should remain united in one thing: refusing silence before what needs to change.