While looking for podcasts on the CBC radio site, I stumbled across something very disturbing. I've been following the crisis in Burma, through the radio and through the net. I know of Burma from looking at the map when I was in grade school. I know that the the present junta (I had to wiki it), renamed it to Myanmar, and the capital city from Rangoon to Yangon. I know that the chief export of Burma is Buddhist monks and the corpses of students.
And now the corpses of Buddhist monks. Thousands of them.
Rwanda happened in my time, when I was in grade school, before I could really say or do anything about it. But this is happening now, as you read this. Remember the last time segment of a population was killed for their religion? We called it the Holocaust.
Elie Wiesel, a famous Holocaust survivor, said in an address in the White House in 1999,
"Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil."
It is our hands that can and must do something. If we don't, all the temples in Burma will be empty. Maybe it is already to late for that. God knows.
When I hear something about a kid I've worked with, when I've read something about the situation in Burma, the flickering hope I have in humanity gets a little smaller. The world is a little more hopeless today. People whose entire existence is devoted to peace, are killed for that devotion. They stood up to a government who has no soul, who finds human life worthless, and who would kill anyone who would stand up to them if they could. And they have.
Imagine a morning, where in Canada, or America for that matter, all the pastors and priests marched on Ottawa to protest human rights. Imagine then, if the RCMP and the military took them all, imprisoned them, shot them, and dumped the bodies in the Great Lakes.
Some days, I just feel that I am nothing more than a witness to our own depravity. My own included.
If God blesses the peacemakers, and calls them His Own, then the streets of heaven today are crowded in orange.
Here's what you can do:
