In this powerful, anonymous op-ed for Vox, an Iranian man talks about how sanctions affected his life growing up, starting when he was a boy in the ‘80s, during the Iran-Iraq War, and going up to 2007, when he was a student at the University of Tehran.
“As students, it never felt as if Ahmadinejad represented us, but neither did we feel any affinity for the United States. It was Ahmadinejad who had brought a new security staff to our university. But it was America that had placed us under siege. We knew our nation’s shortcomings, but in many years of cafeteria debates, my peers and I could never justify how we’d been singled out, why the world seemed to simply not like us. We began to think of ourselves as “the unpeopled,” never seen by the outside world but living as we always had.”
