About Aung San Suu Kyi, Meditator and
Teacher
Source: http://www.alicewalkersblog.com/, May 21, 2009
To paraphrase our beloved James Baldwin: the world is held
together, really the world is held together by the love and
compassion and clarity of thought of a very few individuals. Though
this idea may be frightening, the world being in such distress, it
is also comforting.
At least there are a few people who can be counted on to lead us in
a proper direction for survival as humans, and for thriving as a
species. Aung San Suu Kyi is at the top of the list. That is really
the reason she is jailed and on her way to being imprisoned in
Insein Prison, in Burma, where conditions are notoriously horrific
and from which inmates often emerge, if indeed they do emerge
alive, broken and in need of things like wheelchairs. What can we
do?
My parents grew up in a society very much like Burma’s, in the
Southern United States of North America. Repression of every kind,
for people of color, was the order of the day. They taught their
children to hold an inner dignity as the highest possible sign of
human development, and they taught us to believe in education.
These are things that, when I traveled in Burma recently, I
recognized immediately in the Burmese people. These people, like
the Palestinians who suffer a fate remarkably similar to theirs
under Israeli occupation, are holding a sacred thread, not unlike
the thread of Ariadne, which we can use, if we lend our whole
selves to the effort, to lead us out of the labyrinth of confusion,
and away from the people eating Minotaur that has turned out to be
human greed. It is as astonishing as it is fascinating to see so
clearly that it is our own greed that is eating us.
In Burma it is the greed of a faceless mob of generals who dream up
ways every day to further ransack and impoverish the Burmese
population and the land of Burma itself. Selling its precious
woods, gems and minerals, and routinely enslaving its people to
work on “public projects” designed to enrich those in power. I am
sure the Junta viewed a recent film made in Burma by unbelievably
courageous journalists, journalists with cameras, called Burma VJ:
Report from a Closed Country that thoroughly exposes their
implacable brutality. In graphic detail it shows the relentless
attempt by the Generals to dominate and destroy the Burmese people.
It depicts the soul stirring solidarity of common people with the
monks and nuns who rise in defense of them, and the slaughter of
monks whose very chants, as they’re bludgeoned or shot down, remind
the Burmese people of their non-negotiable belief in Non-Harming.
This is one of the places I suggest we start: viewing and widely
distributing and discussing this film. From the point of view that
everyone on earth is Burmese. Greed knows no nationality or
boundary, and if we wait for things to change in Burma of their own
accord, we will have abandoned what is most threatened in all of
us: our human dignity and our freedom to pursue the life we choose
for ourselves; in other words, democracy. Indeed, true democracy is
what Americans, from all the Americas, are working toward. Largely
because of centuries of greed and theft, we are far from the
goal.
When I returned from Burma in February 2009, I wrote a long letter
to Aung San Suu Kyi. I understood she might never see it; the point
was to send it as a postcard for the world to read, for those who
knew nothing or little of her situation, of Burma’s situation, to
have a quick study in preparation for the struggle to free her and
to give her country back to her, and to the people who love it. As
an offering to a contemporary view of a tiny part of Burma, by a
North American, that I was able to grasp in less than two weeks, I
offer this letter/postcard to anyone who wishes to read it.
There is also an Aung San Suu Kyi webpage where one can find
suggestions for actions. There is a petition that asks the United
Nations to intervene. There are suggestions for places to contact
and people to write. I personally feel we as a world have almost
passed the following point, but I will offer it: It is time for
people to descend en masse in places like Burma and Palestine and
to …. Well, show up. Do I know how to get hundreds and thousands of
people on this journey? No, I don’t. But somebody does; it has been
done before. People showed up en masse in Mississippi decades ago,
and changed the direction of the world. Without the Mississippi
struggle there would be no Obama, for starters; there would be no
possibility of Americans, black and white, feeling the freedom and
joy in each other’s being that is so frequently the most pleasant
and astounding surprise of the recent quarter century.
What makes Aung San Suu Kyi so very special – and Buddhists will
yawn – is that she is a meditator. This means her mind is well
trained to grasp the implications of actions, especially violent
ones, too many of our world leaders seem clueless about. They talk
about annihilating, obliterating, beggaring, starving,
impoverishing, raping and pillaging other human beings as if this
behavior has no consequences to themselves or to those they
represent. This is an incredibly antique way of looking at our
problems: that we can bomb them away. War is a dead end, literally.
And, what is more, we simply can’t afford it. Not morally, and not
financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United
States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country
bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was
foreclosed? We see, if we care to look, that everything really is
connected, and, not only connected, it is the same thing. Aung San
Suu Kyi gets this, which is why she renounces violence in the face
of one of the most violent regimes in the world, while at the same
time not condemning those who, driven to desperate measures by
their mistreatment by the regime, resort to violence in an attempt
to defend themselves.
I can’t think of anything more important than Aung San Suu Kyi’s
struggle, which she is waging so brilliantly. She has proved she is
not afraid of death, and one feels imprisonment will be to her - as
being jailed was for Martin Luther King - simply part of a
necessary pilgrimage of the soul. I am not as concerned about her,
to be honest, as I am about the rest of us. We need Aung San Suu
Kyi. We need her example of integrity, courage, a raging and
revolutionary loving kindness that has kept her steady in her long
years under house arrest. It is amazing to think of the discipline
she has taught herself over these years: to see through the masks
of even the most brutal dictators, and to discern the confused,
unwell, frightened persons behind the masks. To say, even after
years of house arrest: I would hope one day to be friends. I would
sit down and talk with them.
This is a rare being. But not too rare for this world. It was this
world and the Burmese culture and life in India and England, and
her own special spirit that produced her. A spirit, for all its
rareness, not of “heaven” but of Earth. Reading her thoughts one
finds nothing vaporous or otherworldly; she is among the most
practical of people. Aung San Suu Kyi and the people of Burma are
world treasures; if we lose them, we lose knowledge of a human
capacity for wisdom, and an instinct for understanding our human
responsibility for the gift of life, that will mean we may never
know what, on this endlessly giving and radiant planet, a planet
that bows to us every single day, we are doing here.
It is up to the citizens of the world to free Aung San Suu Kyi and
all Burma’s political prisoners, as well as the country of Burma
itself. Our governments, bogged down with the accumulated mistakes
of the past, and burdened by their own entanglement in greed, are
not likely to be sufficient help, even when they are willing. We
must remember as we look about the planet at people like ourselves
who are oppressed and discouraged, that we are the majority.
Sometimes the feeling of being very small in so large a scheme of
suffering hinders us. But, take heart. Before the ice at the polar
caps completely melts and we are all submerged, along with our
dreams, we can do a lot. Especially if we can commit to do even a
little. Once someone pointed out to Sojourner Truth how
insignificant she was; a black person, a woman, recently enslaved.
To paraphrase her acerbic rejoinder: If I’m only a flea on the back
of the stubbornest mule on earth, by God I intend to keep him
scratching.
That we can do. Somebody who reads this, perhaps in China,
Cambodia, Thailand or Burma, will know how to be a flea on the
backs of the Generals in Rangoon. Somebody in Washington, D.C. may
know how to do this. Each of us must find our own mule. Meanwhile,
we cheer you on!
With metta, and in Solidarity with Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Brave
People of Burma, especially the monks and the journalists!
---------------
Alice Walker is an American novelist, short-story writer, poet,
essayist, and activist. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple,
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983.
©2009 by Alice Walker
Source: http://www.alicewalkersblog.com/
thank you for reprinting this article.