CherryPicked 🍒

We and Lady Iran In memory of all the children of Iran who have been killed. Iran has endured centuries of suffering. Her freedom and right to choose her own path have repeatedly been trampled underfoot by powers that have claimed the right to decide her fate for her: God and King, turbaned and bareheaded alike. Come to think of it, why are both God and King men? Why do they both rule through patriarchy? Why do they both think like overbearing fathers, convinced that they know what is best for Iran? ...

For several months now, excessive suffering and evil have gripped Iran and Iranians, pinned them against a wall, and held them down under a rain of blows. Whether from the bullets that scattered our compatriots like autumn leaves on the ground, or the missiles that took the pure lives of our children from the sky. Perhaps the sheer scale of the injustice and futility of this situation, which doesn’t even seem to have achieved anything (and even if it had, it still wouldn’t have been worth the loss of innocent children), has thrown us into crises of feeling abandoned in the universe, or feeling rage at the transcendent forces that some of us believe in. Perhaps some believers, during this time, have felt they had put their faith in a powerless God, while others among us may have soothed their psyche with the thought that there must be some wisdom behind it. Likely some of us who are non-believers have, out of the sheer intensity of the suffering, felt a pull toward believing in a God who could pull us out of this hellish situation. ...

CherryPicked 🍒 I’m a cherry-picker called Ehsan. In official documents my name is Azim, you can call me however you want. I’m a Site Reliability Engineer, which means I accelerate, facilitate, and automate the entire software development process. I only mention this because we do cherry-picking in software engineering. What does that mean? It means we can take a change that we like, developed somewhere else, even by someone else, and pick it up and place it in the middle of changes and growth that we’re creating ourselves. This has always been a scary thing for me because you have to get to know another person and their way of thinking, know yourself and your work, think critically about the situation, and have the courage to combine the two. But well, I’m also a brave person who loves my fears and credits my growth to them. I’m also not particularly averse to making mistakes. ...