I've followed the plight of Tibet under Chinese rule for a long while now, my interest piqued not only by Tibetan Buddhist friends and reading, but especially by a moving documentary I saw about the return of a villager - who had managed to escape the country and eventually settle in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he worked as a stone mason - to see his sister after an interim of many many years. We had occasion to meet this man and talk to him and to the filmmakers, Alan Dater and Lisa Merton, at another showing of the film, Home to Tibet, and speaking to them in person gave me a much greater appreciation for the realities of Tibetan village life. The film is particularly poignant because at the end of his stay with his sister, the man takes a young girl, a relative who is chosen by the family as a person with promise, out of the country so that she can receive an education. We see the parting, knowing along with the girl's parents that it's likely they will never see her again.
Today a friend sent this article about a massive, forced relocation program by the Chinese, aimed at moving Tibetan peasants out of their villages and into new "housing developments" which they are being forced not only to build themselves, but to buy. For some, life in the new dwellings may be better, but the intent over time is to change - and eventually erase - traditional Tibetan society and religion. Is it possible? One wonders. This new initiative may not be violent ethnic cleansing, though it has been in the past, but certainly violence of another sort is being done. The Dalai Lama's non-violent efforts to resist it have been tireless.
The destruction of traditional village life makes me very sad, probably because I can identify with similar patterns in my own life, as I've seen the small agricultural villages and subsistence farms change a great deal in the area where I grew up, and become virtually non-existent in this part of Vermont. I get the same sinking in the pit of my stomach when reading John Berger's descriptions of vanishing rural Alpine life, or books like José Saramago's The Cave. But change due to the pressures of globalization, mechanization, and simple economics is one thing; forced relocation to refugee camps - whether carried out as "housing projects" in Tibet or through the bulldozing of Palestinian villages and the destruction of olive orchards - is quite another, and leaves me feeling weak, helpless, and despairing at the cruelty of human governments and their inexorable march over individual lives.
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