Roxana Saberi: Not Graduation Day

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Today is graduation day at Concordia College, across the river in Moorhead from the community of Fargo where Roxana Saberi grew up.

The featured speaker is not Roxana Saberi.

Oh, she was supposed to be. Roxana was a graduate of Concordia, she was supposed to wrap up her own studies and living in Tehran and be back home in Fargo to take part in Concordia's graduation.

Yesterday, leaders of the community, members of many media organizations, former teachers and professors, and friends and neighbors of the community that she called home gathered at the Veterans Memorial Bridge to show their support for Roxana as she remains within prison walls in Iran.

The bridge's central memorial area is a fitting location, the bridge between the two communities that influenced her school years. Yet it's not an easy place to get to...there's no handy parking on a bridge, no easy access for the disabled. It requires an effort.

Just as it requires an effort for a woman like Roxana, herself a bridge between two cultures, holding dual citizenship here in her American birthplace and in the ancestral home country of her father.

She made the effort to use her skillset to communicate to people. She reported for the BBC, NPR and other media about the people and life in Iran. We surmise she did exactly the same there, tried to share understanding about the people and life in America.

Now her telling has been interrupted by the swift authoritarian actions of the Iranian judicial system. What the final chapter will be we do not yet know.

We only know that the community that is her American hometowns very much wants her here again, soon, to tell it.
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crossposted at firedoglake's Oxdown Gazette