What does it take these days to make a tragedy?
I've been watching, along with the world, events unfold in Burma (not Myanmar!) and can't believe that savagery like this continues in 2007.
Thousands of protesters are dead and the bodies of hundreds of executed monks have been dumped in the jungle, a former intelligence officer for Burma's ruling junta has revealed.
The most senior official to defect so far, Hla Win, said: "Many more people have been killed in recent days than you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand."
They slaughtered unarmed, non-violent Buddhist monks who simply stood up and marched.
The monks filled the streets in their holy robes and said, 'We are tired of this. We want peace, an economic chance. We want dignity.'
The generals said no.
They loaded the monks into trucks and drove them into the jungle.
They dumped their bodies in streams.
The world let itself be shut out. Denied access. It narrowed its eyes and tsk-tsked, but that's about it.
It's an internal affair, China said, let them handle it.
Yes, I guess that's true, America murmured their subservient agreement.
Then China winked, a curious gesture that implied gratitude, but also: 'watch out, you're not going to be on top for long. There's a billion and a half of us who want nothing else but to work long hours for very little.'
Why do I get the sinking feeling that nobody cares about Burma? Myanmar? Whatever it is? That it's just another news story about tragedy somewhere far away.
This decade has been overstuffed with death and fear, starting way back with Y2K to the monks of yesterday.
- September 11th, 2001 -- almost 3,000 Americans died in terrorist attacks.
- February 27, 2002 - A series of riots leaves hundreds dead, after 59 Hindu pilgrims die aboard a train burned by a Muslim mob in Godhra, India.
- March 19th, 2003 -- George Bush launches war with Iraq by subjecting Baghdad to what military planners called Shock and Awe.
- March 11th, 2004 -- Al Queada attacks commuter trains in Spain. 191 people died.
- December 26th, 2004 -- Indian Ocean Earthquake causes deadly tsunami. Over 200,000 souls perished.
- August 29th, 2005 -- Hurricane Katrina destroys New Orleans. 3,000 Americans die in the storm.
- April 17th, 2007 -- Jon Cho shot over 30 fellow classmates at Virginia Tech.
You get the point. How much charity does one little heart have?
Before technology put every starving baby on our TV screen, every knee-high kid wading through garbage for a meal, we were ignorantly indifferent. Now we're simply indifferent. What's it do to our psyche to process the terror and death and injustice and bury it?
Ignorance is bliss.
But what can one do? Give every dollar one has? Fly to Burma? Which I thought of doing, seriously. I pictured shaving my head and joining the cause. Who hasn't dreamt of being Ghandi? But then I remembered I'm leaving for Australia in a couple of days and I need to get a haircut before then and finish this blog and buy some new jeans and on and on and there just isn't enough time in the day for all that and saving the people of Burma from a ruthless military junta.
They have the Nobel Peace Prize winner under house arrest. A Yankee like me would become lion chum in no time.
You should only worry about the things you can change, so that being said I jumped in my car and drove to the hair salon.
Next door to it was a McDonald's with a stream of idling vehicles curved like a bow in the drive-thru. I looked down the line at the faces of the drivers, not with my eyes but the eyes of a monk, and I realized that Samsara comes in all shapes and flavors. The cycle of life/death, suffering, need/want, fear... hate. There's not a heck of a lot of difference between the cows sent through metal grates at the slaughterhouse and the monks lining up for the Myanmar government's butchery.
I remember looking on with pride as I noted the McDonald's signs gradually change through the 80's and 90's: Millions and Millions Served. 100 Million Served. 500. Now the sign says, Billions Served.
It's a brutal cycle: person decides to get McDonald's... waits in drive-thru, pollutes the air, wastes gas... eats unhealthy, fatty food. Person grows fat, lazy... eats more drive-thru. Car pollutes the air, person now drives it everywhere, burning up our precious gas, made from the dinosaurs. Down in the Amazon trees are felled to make room for more cows... more burgers... because person is now fat and lazy and returning to the drive-thru everyday, along with fatty's fat kids... less trees, more idling cars, more global warming... more hardship, displacement, war.
Ectera, bloody ectera.
While the monks of Burma were being slaughtered and dumped in the jungle thousands of Big Macs were being purchased and consumed, the plastic wrappings that will never bio-degrade thrown into trash heaps across the globe. Scientist say in a gazillion years our era on Earth will be identified by a layer of plastic.
Shit, I don't have the answer.
Less plastic. Don't eat McDonald's.
It's a start.
But how can we help the people of Burma? War?
Sanctions? We already have sanctions.
Pressure China? Boycott the Olympics?
(They've been fucking with our Barbies and our toothpaste, and for an athlete trained behind the iron curtain Yao Ming is disappointingly soft on the inside; what more do we need?)
My fear is that it's too late. Brutality was exhibited. The international community watched and sat on their hands as the Burmese military rulers corralled the monks and beat them, tortured them. To defeat the courage and overall righteousness of the monks the army had to literally take their bodies apart. The youth, those too young to have experienced the 1988 massacre, got caught up to date with how it goes down in Burma.
You don't fuck with the generals.
-- Talk about your axis of evil.
Burma: "hey George, what's a brutal regime gotta do to get a little notice around here?!"
If they would do that to monks, what do they do to the other Burmese protesters?
Reports are it's over. The heart has been taken from the movement.
Fear won again.
Fear and apathy.
Apathy on our part.
But what can you do? We're numbed to it, to empathy.
Our empathy tank is empty.
Our tiny monkeybrains are not programmed to respond to the plight of such faraway groups, over and over, it's not how an animal survives.
An animal survives by worrying about oneself.
But the monks!
The monks weren't animals with monkeybrains like you and me, they were enlightened beings who realized their flesh is only temporary anyway and so were willing to give it to the butchers, believing falsely that the world would be moved to their cause and step in to halt the slaughter.
Twenty years ago, or so, the world watched one brave soul stand in front of a tank in Tienmen Square and condemned the Chinese. Yesterday, the Myanmar military junta killed hundreds of holy men and disposed of their bodies in the jungle for the animals to devour with the support aid of Chinese money and trade, and the world is silent, not wanting to spoil the Olympics coming up in Beijing with downer talk like civil rights and economic oppression.
What's changed?
I get the feeling that it's not that China has come so far, it's that the world has sunk that low.
Let it be known that for this report I didn't mention Africa, where a shitload of terrible stuff has gone down since the new millennium, shit that can't be conceptualized by Westerners. Horrible atrocities that if fully expressed would shatter a person's psyche and happy existence. No, they're better off turning the channel to Rock of Love and watching suspensefully who the ex rock star chooses as his "girlfriend".