Today is CSA day, and Rose and her boyfriend just drove to town in my pickup truck full of produce—spinach, chard, lettuces, peas, radishes, asparagus, and spring onions. This is how Rose makes money for college, and how her boyfriend—who is from the city—tries to earn his way back into her good graces. I do not know how he has wronged her, but every time he mistakes a leaf of chard for one of lettuce, she rolls her eyes with such contempt that I swear he gets smaller and smaller. By the time they return, he won’t be able to reach the clutch. . . .
It has been a very long week. Before I had the Internet, all I had to worry about was Pelden Farm, about the thistles that might go to seed in the neighbor’s hay field and the bee hives that might be showing signs of colony collapse and the strawberries that seemed to be looking a little too big, a little too slick, as if they’d been cross-pollinated by some fool’s GMO. When my children gave me the Internet for my birthday, I decided I should put it to good use rather than frittering my time away on Match.com or Facebook. And for an old Buddhist like me, what better cause than the Dalai Lama’s? But I had no idea what I was getting myself into, no idea how difficult it would be to stay true to the cause but stay out of the fight. I read headline after headline—“China Miffed Over France’s Honoring of Dalai Lama”; “China: Government Rebuffs UN Human Rights Council”; “Dalai Lama Hits Out at China Death Sentence”—and by the end of this week, I was fighting mad at the Chinese government and its various minions.
And what was the result? I snapped a whole pan of peas and kept only the pods. I salted a slug instead of relocating it. And I didn’t give Rose’s boyfriend a hint when she asked him to hand her the arugula.
Auntie Seldoen taking on the foes of The Dalai Lama
Geshe-la says there are three poisons, but I suspect there’s really only one: ignorance, which makes fools like me stupid enough to be overly attached and hateful all at the same time. Fortunately, good deeds bring me back to my senses. I’m talking about the report issued by Chinese legal scholars Li Kun, Huang Li, Li Xiang, and Wang Hongzhe from the Open Consulting Initiative in Beijing. This report absolves the Dalai Lama of inciting the March 2008 riots in Lhasa. You can read a summary in The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-novick/the-tibet-question-a-chin_b_212981.html.
The report looks into the causes of social unrest in the Lhasa area, expressing some surprise that while mainland Chinese tend to equate prosperity with personal happiness and patriotic duty, Tibetans link prosperity to “religious belief, a respect for people, a respect for life, the kind of prosperity you get from extending charity to others.” Imagine that.
Of course, this report appeared just days before the Chinese governement rejected 70 recommendations by UN member states related to human rights abuses in China, including “an ongoing crackdown in Tibet.” The Chinese government, says Juliette de Rivero, Geneva advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, “has tried to whitewash its human rights record in the hope that the UN will just look the other way.” (See http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/06/10/china-government-rebuffs-un-human-rights-council.)
Yes, yes—I’m shutting the computer off right now.
Thanks a lot, Grandma!