Burma, Darfur, Baghdad

The past week was rough around Spoonville. But then I think about what is going on in Burma, Darfur, and Baghdad…and there is just no comparison. I read somewhere that one’s subjective experience of suffering is relative to the last bad thing that happened. The enormity of what is going on in “conflict zones” is so difficult to grasp. Even so, the desire to “do something effective” gets more insistent every day.

I worked up a ratio for Iraq to help me stay sensitive to the death and suffering there. If you divide the population of the US by the pre-war population of Iraq, the ratio is roughly 11.5…so when I would hear about civilian deaths from violence, I would multiply by 11.5 and think how big the headlines would be in the US…like the recent Blackwater shootings. Somewhere between 11 and 18 died, I heard….in the US that translates to 126 to 207 deaths. Imagine the headlines in the US. How about this one: 200 killed in a truck bomb at a Baghdad market…that’s 2300 killed in the US, pushing 9/11 scale.

I don’t even want to work up a ratio for Darfur, or Burma. People are dying there in droves, innocent people, monks, men women and children brutally slain. And me, what am I doing about it? Type type type. Candles in a darkness that seems to grow in spite of all the blogging in the world.

What does it mean to be an activist in times like these? For nonviolence to work, it has to be massive, nearly universal, with a dedicated population…nothing left to lose, all to gain. And still there will be death and brutality by the oppressors against the oppressed. So I wonder about violence in defense of the oppressed…

Imagine a world where a US military special forces operation descends on Burma, taking control of the infrastructure, bagging and tagging the top bad guys, swooping into the command center and laying out some new rules, rolling down the barracks parking lots with loudspeakers blaring. Now that is the kind of intervention I could back. And we’d leave as soon as the people had their military under control and the overthrown government reinstated. And anyone that complained about it, we’d say “They were engaged in mass murder against unarmed monks and civilians. We stopped it.” The politicians could do the same in Darfur.

Having the power to stop something evil and not stopping it is to be complicit in the evil.

(Insert standard futile expressions of blanket condemnation and articles of impeachment re: Bush/Cheney/Collaboration Congress here).