Free Tibet Pt 2

So there's a tibetan guy reading this, so I'm kind of shy about hating on the HH tha' DL, which is the Dalai Lama's rapper name. MC to tha HH to tha DL on the mic.

I've continued thinking more about the tibet situation. We had a lecture from this man who runs a bookshop here, and i have also had a couple conversations with him in his bookshop. Losang Tsang-la. Basically, he is a broken, hopeless old man because he actually cares about Tibetan Independance. He wants to fight the revolution against China, but there's no revolution to fight, because it seems like everyone, especially Tibetans, are content to simply watch the cultural and political idea of Tibet die out. Even though the cause is somewhat trendy with white liberals in America, it will be impossible to start a movement for the independance of Tibet until the Tibetan people--lead by the Dalai Lama--take a stand against injustice and fight for their country.

Engaging with this issue has effected my personal worldview, or at least clarified it. I never realized how convinced I am of the duty of human beings to fight injustice, even where nonviolent tactics will be useless. It offends me on an almost personal level that there is only one man in this town who will oppose the Dalai Lama's position, and he is labeled an impossible radical, and made an outcast of the community. This is his analogy: if a mouse is about to be eaten by a lion, it is going to die. If it does nothing and cowers in front of the lion, he may buy a tenth of a second. But if he sucks up his courage, bites the lion in the toe and then runs away, he has a small chance of succseeding--his only chance at life. But more than that, it is the only way he can regain his dignity and humanity; to take strong autonomous action instead of allowing yourself to be manhandled and manipulated. However, the Dalai Lama has been put under pressure not only by the irrisistable force of China's might, but also the even stronger behind-the-scenes political pressure by Western leaders who are despirate to remain economically involved with China.

One aspect of the Tibetan situation that is not widely known about but should be: China has started a massive program of Uranium in Tibet; not only do they use slave labor to mine cheap uranium to sell to the rest of the world at a discount, included in the price of the uranium is the understanding that the forgein buyers of the uranium can give China the radioactive waste created by the nuclear processing. So China has become the custodian of vast amounts of highly toxic radioactive waste, which they have buried in the Tibetan plateau with very little consideration for international safety codes or security. The Tibetan plateau is still very seismically active, and it is also the source of all the major rivers of Asia. If any one of those rivers were to become contaminated due to an earthquake in Tibet, it would directly effect about a solid third or more of the world's population who rely on those rivers as their primary water supply. That sounds like the asian apocalypse to me.

It is really good for me to be reminded of the passion and emotion that lies within me about political injustices like this at this point in the trip. It reminds me to think about my own political struggles in America, and raises the dilemma that I feel about my political life in America. I feel a moral obligation to spend my life fighting injustice, specifically the unspoken injustice of the American system of Incarceration in america. But to dedicate my life to such a cause would be a serious compromise of my personal aspirations and also my happiness and well being--to fight an unwinnable fight takes so much out of a man. I am scared that I would end up like Losang-la in my old age, bitter and broken. Also, it's just not the background I have given myself up to this point--I have really dedicated myself to literature and the ideological systems that lie behind it, and I feel that I have a lot to offer in that area, that my life's work lies in narratives. So I have to find a way to integrate the two, because I cannot turn my back on my moral obligation to fight the growing injustice of oppression in America. I could become a writer who talks about incarceration and it's impacts, to raise awareness either in the academic community or in pop culture about the problem and it's implications. But to do so, I will have to sort of focus my writings on the negative aspects of life in a human body, but my philisophical and aesthetic worldview relies on the beauty of life and narrative, how we can make meaning out of a meaningless world through language and beyond. This is increasingly true while I am here in India--life is too good to overlook. So, at some point I will have to reconcile all these competing emotions, duties and aspirations. I don't want to compartimentalize my life--I don't want to have to say, "this is my day job. It is _______. This is my passion, it is writing/it is fighting against prison." Such things are not hobbies. Playing tabla drums is a hobby. Maybe writing poetry is a hobby. But neither fighting the prison system nor changing the intellectual climate of america is a hobby.
But, I know that it will work out as it works out, and I know that I will look back on my life's work as an old man with pride.

Anyway, Tibet is a hopeless situation in the most profound sense--the HHDL will never take a stronger stand on this issue, and China will never conduct meaningful negotiations because there's nothing in it for them either politically or economically. So, Tibetans are waiting to die silently and slowly, both in the country and in exile.