Iran protests, from Los Angeles

The first week I kept my phone on the pillow, which is a stupid way to sleep, and every time it buzzed I thought: that's a name I know. It usually wasn't. It was a stranger's sister in Mashhad, a clip of a street I half-recognized from a trip when I was twelve, a chant I could translate in my mouth before my brain caught up. I did that work for journalists and for a cousin's friend who ran a channel that kept getting deleted. Mute, unmute, mute. You learn to watch a beating with the sound off because the sound is what stays in the walls of a studio apartment on Rochester Avenue.

I am Iranian-American in the way that means I am not supposed to be simple. Simple would be: the regime is a theocratic racket, the protesters are right, the end. I still basically think that. The complication is not moral. The complication is that I have an uncle who crosses the street to avoid a demonstration because he does not want his daughter's university file to grow a new page, and I have American friends who want a revolution the way they want a limited series: a title sequence, a villain, a Saturday.

Mahsa Amini's name became a password. I am grateful it traveled. I am also tired of it being the only name some people can pronounce. There were names after her. There are names now that don't trend because the algorithm got bored, and boredom in California is not a small cruelty. It is how a crackdown outlasts a hashtag.

The nuclear file sits on a different table in Washington, which is wild to me, because in my family it is the same table. Sanctions, enrichment, the IAEA, the thing someone always calls a "deal" as if it were a lease. Hawks talk like a bomb is a personality the regime cannot wait to unveil. Doves talk like a centrifuge is a misunderstanding. My father used to repair elevators in Shiraz. He says the men who run the program are not misunderstood. They are patient. Patience is not the same as a cartoon of mad mullahs, and it is not the same as a seminar on dignity.

I do not want a war. I have to say that early because the minute you criticize Tehran, somebody in Brooklyn hears aircraft carriers. I have family in apartments that would not survive a "limited strike," a phrase that should be banned for sounding like a spa menu. I also do not want the West to launder the morality police through a lecture on anti-imperialism. You can hate the CIA's greatest hits and still admit a girl should not die because of her hair. If your politics cannot hold that, your politics is a costume.

Protests did not topple the system. I hated typing that. People I translated for hated it more. Some of them are in prison. Some of them are here now, in LA, driving Uber and arguing about whether the diaspora is useful or just loud. We are loud. Westwood on a weekend is a museum of old arguments, royalists and leftists and people who just want to buy fesenjan and not be asked about 1953.

The other side's real point — I will try to say it without swallowing it — is that "regime change" as an American product has a body count and a record of installing the next nightmare. Iraq is not a rumor in my community. We watched that too. So when a senator says the Iranian people are ready, I want to know which people, which city, who he talked to besides a salon in Encino. Readiness is not a mood you can poll from a green room.

Still. Still. I cannot do the both-sides of a gunshot. The Basij is not a misunderstanding. The executions are not a "cycle of violence" like a weather pattern. When women in Iran take off the compulsory scarf they are not doing a TED Talk. They are betting a file, a job, a brother. I sit in traffic on the 405 and feel disgusting for having a day.

Nuclear latency, breakout, all the jargon. I interpret some of those meetings. The men use words like architecture. I go home and my mother asks if she should call her sister this week or wait, because calls become data. That is the actual architecture.

If I had a policy, it would be small and unsatisfying: keep the protesters visible without turning them into a Pentagon slide. Enforce the sanctions that hit the IRGC's toys, stop pretending a luxury mall in Dubai is a human-rights sideshow, and do not bomb a country as a substitute for knowing it. Also — this is the messy sentence — I want the people who chant "Woman, Life, Freedom" in Persian on Wilshire to show up when the same state hangs a protester in a yard, not only when it is a news cycle that flatters us.

My uncle told me to stop posting. He was not wrong about the risk calculus from his kitchen. I was not wrong about the silence calculus from mine. We haven't fully forgiven each other. We still send voice notes about my cousin's exam. The revolution, or whatever that season was, lives in the gap between our warnings.

Americans love an ending. Iran is not going to give them one on a schedule. That does not make the street in 2022 a fad. It makes it a debt. I keep the translations in a folder I should not keep. Sometimes I open it. Sometimes I go to the grocery store on Westwood Blvd and buy herbs and I do not look at my phone until I am home, which is a privilege so large I almost don't want to write it down.

If you ask me whether the Islamic Republic will fall, I will say I don't do prophecy. If you ask me whether I am on the side of the girl in the clip with the sound off, I will say yes, and I will say it without a theory of the region attached, because she did not ask for my theory. She asked for a street that didn't kill her.

That is not a foreign-policy doctrine. It is the only sentence I have that doesn't feel like a press release.