Here's the link to the URL with the photos. I can't figure out how to post them directly on OpEd News. (View photos below. Click on photo to enlarge)
Here's the main temple, a few street scenes, breakfast at my hotel, the Rangoon international airport baggage carousel and the downtown post office -- which still functions like the post office where I used to work my way through college, prior to Zip Codes.
I'll write more about Burma when I get home, have more time to think and have more access to the internet. I'll be home January 1, 2009.
Happy New Year!
More photos from Burma (Rangoon
)Here's the main temple, a few street scenes, breakfast at my hotel, the Rangoon international airport baggage carousel and the downtown post office -- which still functions like the post office where I used to work my way through college, prior to Zip Codes.
I'll write more about Burma when I get home on January 1, 2009, have more time to think and have more access to the internet.
Happy New Year!
Holiday greetings from Burma....
I'm having a wonderful time in Myanmar -- and I have 1,248 photos to prove it. Wish you were here.
Burma is a wonderful. Everyone here is totally friendly and there is so much to see. I could run on for hours about how Burma is the last undiscovered tourist paradise but the internet connections here aren't all that hot.
"But what about the Junta," you might ask. "We've heard that Myanmar is a military state. Are you safe?"
Apparently the generals all live in some new capital city somewhere off in the jungle and seem to have reached some sort of agreement with the rest of the Burmese -- you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone. I could be wrong about this but that's what I've experienced so far. I've seen over 3,000 Buddhist monks and nuns so far but only one soldier.
Burma is a tourist paradise. Think Thailand forty years ago. I love it here.
Happy holidays.
PS: My granddaughter, baby Mena, is now standing up all by herself. Mena, PLEEZE don't take your first steps until I get back!
Business not as usual in Thailand: Hotels are only 10% occupied
I arrived in Thailand last night at 1:00 am and will leave for Burma this afternoon. My knees are holding up okay. They hurt. I walk on them anyway. What more can I say.
On the flight over, I talked with several people in the various airports about what happened when peaceful protesters took over the Bangkok International Airport last week. "The airlines were very helpful in finding us places to stay and the protesters were very nice," said one young father who was meeting his wife in Bangkok after she had been stranded there for two weeks. And the airport itself looked like nothing had happened there. It was all fresh and clean. And on the way to the hotel I discovered that Thailand, like almost every other country in the world, has our typical American Bechtel freeways -- put in with American loans. Green freeway signs.
That's what happens if you take out loans from Uncle Sam. Instead of being able to use that money to benefit your country, you get Bechtel shoved in your face. But I digress.
Anyway, I'm staying in a hotel in Bangkok, typing as fast as I can. And our guide said, "The hotels here in Thailand are only filled to 10% capacity -- and this is the height of the tourist season. It's sad."
And I talked with my friend Tony who lives here and he says, "The airport protest was totally peaceful and is a good example of democracy in action." So maybe the reason the hotels are so empty is because of Bush's recession. Ya think?
Gotta go catch my plane!
Peace Pilgrim II: Driving across America in a wheelchair?
(Photos are of the original Peace Pilgrim, my ankle when it first started swelling up, me in the Las Vegas airport coming back from the St. Louis debates back when my knees actually sort of worked (I won $40!), and me and my daughter Ashley touring the Berkeley Bowl in an electric scooter)
"Mom, you've got cankles," said my daughter Ashley. Cankles? What in the world are are cankles? "You know -- legs that go straight from your calves to your feet." Oh.
What to do?
"Sue the bastards!"
Yesterday I went and had my knees acupunctured. They feel better already. I think I'm actually going to be able to crawl to the airport tomorrow to fly off to Burma -- via the newly re-opened Bangkok International Airport.
We all know about globalization -- it's what happens when corporate interests supersede national identities. Didn't we used to get told back in the 1970s and 1980s that this was a good thing -- a sort of peace-keeping corporate version of the United Nations? World peace through commerce?
And then suddenly we poor outsourced schmucks began to realize that by allowing corporate interests to trump national interests, we were not creating a new peaceful world so much as massive mega-corporations were creating a vast world-wide cheap labor pool. And that globalization was just another form of warfare -- economic warfare. That's not good.
In addition, this new globalization movement also created interlocking situations where corporate hands secretively reached into every country in the world and took over the very functions of governments themselves. And they also took over political systems, even here in the U.S., making the decisions as to who was gonna be in charge of individual countries. It was the era of the "Economic Hit Man" and the "Jackals". The globalization octopus seemed to reach everywhere and have its tentacles into everything. There was no stopping it.
Of course countries like the United States and Russia and China had tanks and guns and bombs but even they couldn't stop globalization -- or defend their individual countries against it. You just can't drop a nuclear weapon on Citigroup or Monsanto. Nations began to lose not only their own sovereignty but also the ability to protect themselves.
Until Mumbai.
What happened in Mumbai has taught us that the globalization octopus's tentacles CAN be cut off -- or at least damaged. The baby doesn't have to be thrown out with the bath water. A few surgical removals of globalization's central communications and exploitation headquarters and "Voila!" The octopus is forced back into its undersea cave.
But there is only one problem with this new war on globalization. It is the same problem that we've had with the war on Iraq -- and even with World War II. War is still war. And war still sucks eggs. And war is still harmful to children and other living things.
