Because She Died On TV

After a week of closely following the Iranian protests, on Saturday, like so many others, I saw the video of 27 year-old Neda Agha-Soltan bleeding to death in the arms of her music teacher in the streets of Tehran.

I don’t claim to approach policy or politics without prejudice. I’m an unapologetic and impatient liberal. But I do approach them without emotion… as best I can. I had been doing a pretty good job of that watching events unfold in Iran. Until Saturday.

On Saturday, when I saw Neda Agha-Soultan die, I immediately thought of Roger Waters’s song “Watching TV” which he wrote about a young Chinese student who died in Tiananmen Square. Particularly these last lines:

“And she is different from Cro-Magnon man.
She’s different from Anne Boleyn.
She is different from the Rosenbergs
and from the unknown Jew.
She is different from the unknown Nicaraguan:
Half superstar; half victim.
She’s a victor star: conceptually new.
And she is different from the Dodo,
and from the Kankabono.
She is different from the Aztec,
and from the Cherokee.
She’s everybody’s sister.
She’s symbolic of our failure.
She’s the one in fifty million
who can help us to be free,
because she died on TV.”

I don’t know the name of the Chinese student Waters was writing about, and I haven’t seen the video that he saw. But I know that Neda’s death, while tragic and unforgivable, won’t be in vain if the fact that we have it on video for the whole world to see helps lead to real change in Iran.