CHINA! READ THIS NOW!

First, watch this brief video:

Here's what's happening.  Six million Tibetans are living under Chinese oppression, and thirty of them have self-immolated over the last year in an attempt to secure two of their most fundamental human rights:  freedom and self-determination.  There's over 100,000 Tibetans living in exile, and most prominently—how much more prominent can you get than the front of the UN?—three of them are now in the late stages of a hunger strike.

These three heroic Tibetans, gradually ending their lives in front of the UN (one was removed recently to a hospital where he is still refusing food, but is being fed intravenously) are speaking out in solidarity with their Tibetan brothers and sisters in Tibet.  They are happy for the rest of us to listen in on this conversation, and of course, they are happy if we act on their behalf, but make no mistake about it: the primary conversation here is between Tibetans who are struggling for basic freedoms in Tibet and those who are supporting that struggle in exile.

If I were just a bit more advanced spiritually, I believe I might see extending from eastern Tibet to the eastern United States, an arc of light that is the manifestation of the human desire to live a free and independent life.  

So Tibetans in Tibet are talking to Tibetans in exile, and the Tibetans in exile are talking back, and they are using an eloquent semaphore of survival, an evolved sign-system that, were I part of the Chinese occupying force, would send fear running up and down my spine.

This is the conversation that the rest of us are witnessing.

The power of the human heart, in this case, manifested dramatically through the Tibetan heart, and manifested in solidarity among Tibetans separated by many thousands of miles, and moving in step, inexorably toward freedom, of one mind and many hearts . . . well, I can't point to a time in history when this particular spirit was finally and ultimately defeated.  No lie, as Thomas Carlyle wrote, can live forever.

When you looked into Dorjee Gyaltso's eyes in that video, didn't you see that?