Another Side of Freedom

By Anonymous / Fall 2020

It was almost 7 years ago when I exited airplane and felt the US soil under my feet. It was a magical feeling, everything seemed new, exciting. I felt the fresh air in my lungs. I came from Iran, a third world country, to the first world country as I was told. When I was in Iran, used to watch Hollywood movies and shows, extremely excited about immigrating to the US. Finally, after 21 years waiting, I was able to achieve one of my biggest dream. Who does not want to get a chance to live their beautiful American Dream?

It was a hard choice for me, to put my family and friends behind in Iran to come to the US, by the condition of Iran and USA conflicts, I could risk the chance not to visit my country and family again, but still American Dream was the motivation for me. Freedom of speech, choosing religion, and many other freedoms that are in many Iranian’s dreams.

The first thing I noticed about the US was that anyone can start building their life without any law forbidding it, but after a while I noticed that even there is no law on the paper toward different races or sex, people has different attitude toward different people. For example, I have noticed that where I used to work, our manager unconsciously did not like to hire African American people, she said “, from past, I did not have a good experience with them.” That was a shock for me because she was a Porto Rican. She judged us and gave us chores or big tip deliveries to the people she liked more. That was not fair to hire from experience of past employees’ race or sex. I had a job before that at a 7-eleven, the owner of the store was Iranian. He mostly hired Iranian, and white people. As an Iranian, who came here to a fair country, he made to be ashamed about me being an Iranian. This was not what I expected from this country. Racism is a mentality enabled by society itself, I mean before I came here, I did not see the hidden racism inside each individual in this country, how a big hatred could become each individuals’ personality?

Besides racism, I noticed that in the US, people mostly care about others if there is a value in it for them or it is enforced by law. What I am trying to say is that the moral care and respect in the culture is mostly forgotten. The reason could be the lifestyle in the US makes you to be short in your free time, and the laws and rules gives the fear to do emotional things in some ways. Nobody goes to their neighbor and as to barrow something or ask them to come over and have a company, they scare to that or do not have the time to do things like that. Why? Kindness, being generous, giving love, respect, and other moral and emotional behaviors have been fading out form this nation and its people. Families, marriage, most of the things I see here are like businesses. Kids pay their parents to take of their grandchildren, parents give their kids to like take care of dogs or other things. This could be a good way to make children responsible for their money, but this is giving them the mentality that they need to be paid to do stuff for their parents even when they are grownups. Families here mostly talk and visit each other’s in a while, the culture as I said before is like building a business than an emotional and logical  lifestyle.

The same is the reason of the racism, as long as parents transfer their old mentality about other races, racism would continue to be in the society with no expiration time.