Eric's Beijing Diary

This evening, on my way back from the East side, I stopped by the Bookworm in Dongsishitiao for a lecture night. The speaker tonight was Ben Rogers, who works for an international Christian human rights organization. He was here to present his book on the Karen people of Burma. Burma (Myanmar) has been in the news from time to time, because of the fact that the democratically elected leader has been under house arrest for many years. From an American perspective, the solution is to turn the government over to the individual elected by the people. To the Americans, the will of the people is preeminent, unless the people elect a leader or leaders the Americans don't like (such as Hamas). Personally, I think the American position is hopelessly hypocritical and misguided. The focus of international attention should not be on what group of people is in power, but on how those who are in power treat their people. This is the issue.

I asked Mr. Rogers what we could do. I mean, it is good to have a meeting like this, to become informed about what is going on in the world. But sometimes, in our media intensive world, we are inundated with news of troubles and sorrows in many corners of the world, and it soon becomes overwhelming. There is way more than we can ever possibly respond to, and this process hardens us. Every time you see sorrow and do not respond to it, you tend to harden yourself, because it is just too painful to care. I did not want this presentation to be just one more tragedy to harden myself to. He seemed to feel that anything we could do to influence the powers that be to call for a security council resolution would be helpful. I am not sure about this, and I don't know what in the world I can do to influence the security council. I guess I just need to try to become informed, and then be prepared to respond if the opportunity presents itself. If you're interested, there's a brief article by Ben Rogers in Christianity Today that, I think, is a good introduction to the problem.