Iranian People Act More Resigned Than Revolutionary These Days
While Tehran is actually becoming slightly more livable, pessimism reigns, Barbara Slavin reports for Al-Monitor. What's most striking is the growing feeling that life will not get better anytime soon. "We may as well enjoy life because who knows what will happen tomorrow?” was the way one Tehrani put it.
TEHRAN — Cool breezes wafted through the trees and water gushed down the mountainside as young Iranians sipped tea and leaned against cushions on raised wooden platforms known as a takht-e choobi.
Taking advantage of an unexpected three-day holiday provided by the government last week to reduce traffic and improve security for a summit of Non-aligned nations, Tehranis flocked to the city's Darband neighborhood, one of several popular places in the foothills of the Alborz mountains that cradle the Iranian capital from the north. Such mountain retreats provide an inexpensive escape from the summer heat and pollution — as well as from the social restrictions of the Islamic Republic that forbid unrelated men and women from spending un-chaperoned time together.
These days, Iranians need such diversions more than ever.
Sanctions and economic mismanagement have cut the value of the local currency, the rial, compared to the dollar, so that the average monthly salary is worth only $500 compared to $1,000 a year ago. That makes it hard to pay rent of $100 or more for a tiny apartment, to buy chicken that costs $2 a pound, tomatoes that go for 50 cents a pound or gasoline at 35 cents a liter.
