Years of Poems and Spirits

5/12 – One year anniversary of the Sichuan Earthquake. A day should always be remembered.

But personally, today is a day I can’t forget soon enough. Some unfortunate mishap just amplified the bruised ego, the self-doubt, the self-pity–all the dark thoughts I am trying to shake off. Everything I read, everything I heard seems to be telling me something. The article on Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes caps a frustrating day.

Steady … steady.

Continuing the sentiment …

Taking notes from Yakima, WA. Beautiful full moon rising over the vast East Washington plain tonight.  Reminded me of Ansel Adam’s famous photograph.

Notes:

Leading Democrats advocated financial market deregulation as late as 2007

From a yellowing page I saved from two years ago, on Feb 5, 2007 issue, James Surowiecki commented on a report released by Bloomberg and Schumer. The thesis? Too much regulation hurts America capital market. “The U.S. is losing its leading competitive position” because rules like Sax-O.

Also in the article: numbers to undermine the study and previous dooms day predictions to stall major reforms.

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The Dec. 8, 2008 issue has a profile on Naomi Klein

Summary: accused Milton Friedman of using turmoil and disasters to promote fundamental capitalism. Book “Shock Therapy”. Seems like a popular activist with little academic grounding.

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Stunning photograph: Chen Jiagang, The Great Third Front

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July 28, 2008 Profile on the Chinese PhD student who compiled a popular video after the Tibetan riot. First video of such. Neither artistic nor articulate, yet pretty full of anger (my impression)

Date: 4/25/2008, Name, CTGZ/Tang Jie. Fudan Western Philosophy PhD student, can read English and German. Used books to support his bed.

A typical Fen Qing netizen, except he’s imbused with exposure to Western thoughts. Also, his professor “rejoiced” over the video he produced.

A disconnection between experience and learning, possibly.

Read the Rwanda article in the NYkr. It is a painful read.

Basically, the reporter told the stories of national reconciliation (of some sort) undergoing in that country 15 years after the genocide took place.

The reason it is painful is because it is challenging the universal concept of “justice” (i.e. the perpetrators hold accountable and the victims compensated). Normally, after massacres like such took place, a few people would be punished. However symbolic the trials of those a few maybe, they do serve as the stopping stone against which a nation can move forward again.

In Rwanda, the difficulty is the crime was perpetrated collectively. An entire people should be on trial (in fact, hundreds of thousands of Hutu were thrown into jails after the order was restored). Even worse, the perpetrators and the victims have been long living amongst each other for ages, so much so that it is impossible to cleanly divide the country.

Furthermore, the country lives on foreign aid (50% of the national budget) and reconciliation is the precondition. As a result, the victims have to live next to their killer neighbors again, with the memory and pains of the killing still fresh, knowing full well that their neighbors’ “repentance” is too stylized to be trusted.

This painful reality can be best summarized by the country’s President’s words, “I wish there were a way of winding time and making it run faster”, meaning that the current tentative peace could solidify and the pain and suffering will dissipate sooner.

When most people would rather rewind time to live their past again, this sentiment just tells how painful it is to be a victorious survivor in Rwanda today.