Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"The second city of Mandalay is also subject to the same curfew and military commanders have been put in direct charge of them both.
One man, standing between baskets of fruit and vegetables on a street of the city of five million, was defiant -- but only in hushed tones." [1]
Fiction would seem more the province for the description you have just read.
The politics that grow of gun barrels appear in Myanmar to have grown out of a very few gun barrels, but the power of intimidation in a gun is numberless: one or one million, no one (outside of Islam) cares to step in front of one and beg the predictable round.
As the news grinds on with flash and fire, there are many untold stories that could do with investigation:
- What is Burma's true balance sheet and what is the true nature of the role of economic disparity in the conflict with the ruling junta?
- Beneath the surface yearning for democracy, what are the interests of latent political organizations or entrepreneurial change agents?
- How does the distribution of material and service-based wealth in Burma differ from class-related experiences around the world?
- Freedom certainly refers to more than the arrangement of the distribution of goods and services, but what is that "more" for the Burmese?
Democracy provides for a predominantly peaceful process for the evolution of laws and the balancing always of the interests of the privileged with the aspirations and needs of individuals of every class. It does not produce a perfect or utopian society, but it effectively reduces misery at the bottom while sustaining what might be called sunshine at the top (altogether, in my very humble opinion, the American people could do with a better deal themselves).
Were the generals to reduce the level of repression in their country, agree to the development or more participatory government, or even cash out and leave the country, what, really, would changes would come next for the society as a whole?
Anyone reading care to answer, comment here or e- me.
1. "Yangon residents defiant, but fearful." Reuters, September 27, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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