Alice Walker on the continuing detention of Aung San Suu Kyi

President Obama has joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and other international leaders in calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. The military rulers of Myanmar (Burma) are trying Suu Kyi for violating the terms of her detention because a U.S. citizen entered her home.

Writer and activist Alice Walker was recently in Myanmar, and these reflections are from her blog:

"What makes Aung San Suu Kyi so very special – and Buddhists will yawn – is that she is a meditator. This means her mind is well trained to grasp the implications of actions, especially violent ones, too many of our world leaders seem clueless about. They talk about annihilating, obliterating, beggaring, starving, impoverishing, raping and pillaging other human beings as if this behavior has no consequences to themselves or to those they represent. This is an incredibly antique way of looking at our problems: that we can bomb them away. War is a dead end, literally. And, what is more, we simply can’t afford it. Not morally, and not financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed? We see, if we care to look, that everything really is connected, and, not only connected, it is the same thing. Aung San Suu Kyi gets this, which is why she renounces violence in the face of one of the most violent regimes in the world, while at the same time not condemning those who, driven to desperate measures by their mistreatment by the regime, resort to violence in an attempt to defend themselves.

"I can’t think of anything more important than Aung San Suu Kyi’s struggle, which she is waging so brilliantly. She has proved she is not afraid of death, and one feels imprisonment will be to her - as being jailed was for Martin Luther King - simply part of a necessary pilgrimage of the soul. I am not as concerned about her, to be honest, as I am about the rest of us. We need Aung San Suu Kyi. We need her example of integrity, courage, a raging and revolutionary loving kindness that has kept her steady in her long years under house arrest."

There's much more on Alice Walker's blog, from her visit to Myanmar and from a long letter written to Suu Kyi. How are we to respond? What can we do? These are questions so often asked. The answers, even in a day of global connectivity, are as illusive as ever. But "showing up" and taking some action, Walker assures us, are important nonetheless.