Matthew Saw, Period 2, 5/4/21/ Day A

 What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and/or power?

Currently, in a small country in Southeast Asia known as Myanmar, there is a military coup going on. Essentially, unable to accept that their power and standing had been taken away with the country’s new shift towards democracy, the military generals of Myanmar organized a coup to overthrow the legally elected cabinet of the country. There have been protests and riots against this seizing of power, but with unarmed civilians going up against heavily armed Burmese soldiers, there have been many casualties. No action against this has been taken by any other country. My family is from Myanmar, and I even lived there for a short while when I was younger. It is horrifying to see the place your family’s culture hails from be cut down while the rest of the world sits by and says nothing about it. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for my parents, for them to have to see their childhood homes destroyed, or to watch people they know die in a battle they cannot win. 

How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

My parents have told me that they wish that the protesters would just give up because they can’t stand to see any more of them get hurt in this massively uneven battle. They see the fight as pointless, and can’t understand why the protestors, literally teenagers, would throw away the rest of their lives for a cause that will not prevail. I can understand this perspective, and I can see why they would say that, but I can also understand the perspective of the Burmese people as well. They fought for years, decades even, for their country to have the same freedom they saw the western world experiencing, but when they finally achieved it, it was taken away from them in only a matter of a few years. They know it’s a battle they cannot win, that going against an entire army will only end in their own deaths, but they cannot sit by and do nothing as everything they worked for is torn away from them and they are forced back into a world they just barely managed to escape. For them, it’s not about winning, it’s about being able to live and die by your own beliefs without giving in, even in the face of an unbeatable opponent.