“You will just be wasted in another country.” “We shouldn’t abandon our country when it needs us more than any other time,” Ayesha, a university graduate, remembers telling him. She grew angry as they sat in a restaurant, and said she would not leave. The day before Taliban forces took Kabul, one of those departing friends asked Ayesha when she herself would go. As the Taliban swept across Afghanistan in early August, every day she found herself saying goodbye to another young, well-educated friend who was fleeing the country. “This is one of the most difficult choices I ever experienced,” she says. One month into Taliban rule, she is trying to flee. Yet, if you don’t leave, you are wasted here.”Īyesha had planned to stay. “You feel like you are betraying your country by leaving. “You are in a paradox,” says Ayesha, a university graduate who did not want to reveal her real name for safety reasons.

Many young people, even those still in Afghanistan because they had no way to flee last month, cannot imagine a future in the sort of country the Taliban seem to envision.īut going into exile is never easy. The Taliban are re-imposing harsh restrictions on their role. But it has also forced many to choose between a personal desire to flee for safety and a sense of obligation to serve their country.įor educated women, there seems to be no choice. The Taliban takeover in Afghanistan has shattered the dreams of a generation of Afghans who had hoped to help end 40 years of fighting and bring their country into the modern era. That’s true among friends, parents and children, husbands and wives. In short, the country is catching up to what has always been true: Love bridges racial differences. By 1992, when my daughter was born, 48% approved. In 1968, a year after the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage, 20% of Americans approved of the practice.

That’s up from a mere 4% in 1958, when Gallup first asked the question.

Specifically, of the 1,007 adults across the United States polled by phone in July, 94% approve of marriages between Black people and white people. What was once perceived as an egregious mismatch is now widely accepted. I flashed back on those early days when I saw the results of a recent Gallup Poll on interracial marriage. Here was this cute-as-can-be baby girl, and people were focused on the fact that we didn’t match.Īs she grew older and her skin naturally darkened, we looked more like the African American mother-daughter pair people expected, so the questions ceased. Too often, I indulged the question, when all it deserved was the obvious answer. As an infant, she hadn’t fully grown into her “color,” but she didn’t exactly look white, either. I got that question a lot after adopting my daughter.

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