Burma: a sadness so unbelievable

In an article today in the New York Times, several more first-hand accounts of the recent demonstrations and crack-down are given. The article, titled "A Few Voices From the Deepening Silence" provides a few intimate stories of those who were there.

A housewife recalled the brutality she saw while shopping for food Sept. 28:

...Someone who was with me at a previous job lost her son in these protests. He might have been on his way home, but we don’t know. This mother had a friend in the army and she asked him for help. He told her to stay home and — no questions. The son, her only child, is still missing.

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A young man described how the junta has clamped down on social exchange, destroying trust among people:

There is no more connection between people. It’s been broken... This is not the end. This is just a stopping point and we are not satisfied. We don’t know the future but we will keep our anger burning inside.

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A teacher talked about the pain of seeing Buddhism desecrated and the fear of the military that spread among the monks:

I cannot continue to tolerate this. We only hope that bad karma will fall upon them but there’s nothing else we can do now.... The day after the shootings started, I went to this monastery and the faces that I saw on those monks was something I had never seen. It is not fear. It was a sadness so unbelievable.

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A businessman whose company lost an enormous amount of business during the upheaval lamented Myanmar’s isolation:

My own experience of traveling to other countries opened my mind and changed my life. I loved the freedom I found in the United States. It was something I had never experienced. If I hadn’t spent time abroad, I would have ended up as a military man. Or else I could have been an informer exposing the conversation we’re having right now.

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