The Quiet War

I've been reading and learning about what is referred to as 'The Quiet War'. You should do the same. I first learned about it while reading the book in my last post.

[In the United States the conflict in Laos was called the ‘Quiet War’- as opposed to the noisy one in Vietman, whose escalation had turned the Laotian civil war into an international free-for-all, with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China throwing their weight behind the Pathet Lao while the United States continued to back the Royal Lao. But for the Hmong, the war was anything but quiet. More than two million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos, mostly by American planes attacking communist troops in Hmong areas. There was an average of one bombing sortie every eight minutes for nine years.]

Surprise, surprise, the United States interfering when they shouldn't have. (Read about the 1954 and 1962 Geneva Accords)

King Savang Vatthana of Laos made this statement in 1961.

[Our country is the most peaceful in the world….At no time has there ever arisen in the minds of the Lao people the idea of coveting another’s wealth, of quarreling with their neighbors, much less of fighting them. And yet, during the past twenty years, our country has known neither peace nor security….Enemies of all sorts have tried to cross our frontiers, to destroy our people and to destroy our religion and our nation’s aura of peace and concord. Foreign countries do not care either about our interests or peace; they are concerned only with their own interests.]

Prince Souvanna Phouma, Prime Minister of Laos, addressed Henry Kissinger in 1973 when he was visiting Vientiane.

[The very survival of Laos rests on your shoulders. But your shoulders are very broad. We are counting on you to make our neighbors understand that all we want is peace. We are a very small country; we do not represent a danger to anybody. We count on you to make them know that the Lao people are pacific by tradition and by religion. We want only to be sovereign and independent. We ask that they let us live in peace on this little piece of ground that is left to us of our ancient kingdom….Therefore we must count on our great friends the Americans to help us survive.]

The Americans used the Hmong people to inflict their ideals on another country, bombed their communities, disturbed their way of life, and then pulled out before anything they had set out to do was accomplished (taking all USAID with them). Shortly after, a newspaper of the Lao People's Party announced that all Hmong must be exterminated down to the very core of their tribe, because of their support to the Americans. This activated the migration of the Hmong people to Thailand, refugee camps, and eventually to the United States, where they are viewed as lazy, backwards, and primarily as a group who takes advantage of the welfare system.

History repeats itself. Our responsibility is to know and understand our history, not so we can walk around with our heads buried in our chest from guilt, but so we can learn and make better choices in the future. I think about the links between Vietnam and the War in Iraq a lot, and this 'Quiet War' has me thinking about those connections again. When will we pause before assuming our way is best? And what makes us think violence will persuade a country to live peaceably?

Read.This.Book.

I'm getting ready to finish the book we've been reading in Book Club this month. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down follows a Hmong refugee family living in California that has an epileptic daughter- and the clash between their animistic culture and the Western world of medicine. It's reminded me of the numerous differences between Western and Eastern culture- especially in dealing with the soul of a person. While the Hmong family wanted holistic treatment, which included dealing with the spirit of a person, American doctors only treated the physical and usually over-medicated.

There were a lot of sections that got me thinking....where a Hmong should bury their placenta (or their 'soul-jacket') after birth, what animals to sacrifice during different rituals and how to cultivate opium poppies in the hills of Laos. But the most beautiful concept came up yesterday.

This is an excerpt about the qeej, a tradition Hmong instrument used in funeral rituals to send a soul back to its jacket:

[The idea that a qeej, whether bamboo or plastic, can 'speak' to its audience- for example, by giving travel directions to a dead soul- is not a metaphor. Four of its six pipes represent the tones of the Hmong language, and Hmong who have learned to understand the qeej can decode actual words 'sung' by the resonating pipes. Just as they do not make the conventional Western distinctions between body and mind or between medicine and religion, the Hmong do not distinguish, as we do, between language and music: their language is musical, and their music is linguistic. All Hmong poetry is sung. Several other musical instruments, called 'talking reeds,' similarly blur the boundary between words and melody.]

I absolutely love this! So many Western philosophers and intellectuals would love to communicate in a way that resonates with people and have the impact that many musicians have. Western musicians connect with people but don't always have a specific concept to communicate. I love that this instrument combines the two- that there is no distinction between language and music, or the physical and the spiritual. So beautiful!

You Know You're in Kansas When...

1. You see nothing but greens and blues and browns.

2. The people at the gas station stand around the counter, shooting the breeze, instead of waiting in line to pay. They determine who's next by who they remember coming in first.

3. 3 out of 4 men in any parking lot have non-ironic handle mustaches.

4. When your car dies on the side of the road, you will have more strangers pulling over to help than the total amount of people I know in Chicago.

5. Even in the midst of a crisis, people will sit and chat about last night's high school baseball game.

6. You can hear yourself think.

7. You're hugged by everyone you know, multiple times, until they get used to seeing you.

8. You feel at home. :)

Mr. Bin Laden

It's disturbing for me to hear so many people praising the death of someone they don't know. I understand the 'victory' this must represent psychologically for most Americans, but still don't resonate with most of our nation's decisions about murdering humans they don't like or understand or think deserve the right to life, liberty and happiness. I suppose that's what war is....that justification of others not deserving life- especially others who aren't like us. But who makes those decisions? Who wants blood on their hands?

Why are our international relations influenced mostly by hate, greed, and fear?

Anyway, Wendell Berry always helps me articulate what I'm thinking about.

Enemies

If you are not to become a monster,
you must care what they think.
If you care what they think,

how will you not hate them,
and so become a monster
of the opposite kind? From where then

is love to come- love for your enemy
that is the way of liberty?
From forgiveness. Forgiven, they go

free of you, and you of them;
they are to you as sunlight
on a green branch. You must not

think of them again, except
as monsters like yourself,
pitiable because unforgiving.

Thank you Marcus Aurelius

'Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.'

'Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.'

It's hard to remember (so I'm glad I read this) that change is not only inevitable, natural, and needed to keep all things evolving....It's also good. It's 'the seed of that which will be.'

So good. :)

THE Dilemma

Why can't I get paid to do cool things?