49 years...

Sitting in my apartment, I can hear, just barely, the cries of 'free Tibet' from the protest happening in front of the Chinese consulate a couple of blocks away. A few minutes ago, I walked by. A group of 50 or so, mostly Tibetan, were standing in the dreary cold rain with their signs and flags and yelling, as they have been for a couple of hours. From the gated consulate across the street walked a number of people going about their duties, seemingly immune to the exiles' cries.

It is often said that 'might doesn't make right', and as true as this may be, it unfortunately makes real. 49 years ago the Dalai Llama fled Tibet after its invasion by China. Since then Tibetans have been subject to expulsions, imprisonments, executions, and the recent influx of millions of Han Chinese, who have made Tibetans a socio-economic minority in their own country, if not a demographic one. China's military power is infinitely stronger than what little military resistance Tibetans inside and outside of Tibet could muster. Its economic power allows it to be insolently unyielding to any demands for independence, limited autonomy, or even basic human rights. And Tibet has fallen prey to the most fatal of modern Trojan horses - oil. And so the extermination of a rich culture, the exploitation of a beautiful land, and the violation of any sense of justice continues.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to see a way out. Even the Dalai Llama has relinquished claims to sovereignty, preferring to strive for more achievable demands - perhaps we should call them 'requests' - for religious and other freedoms within Tibet. And so the protesters cry out at the powerful who sit behind gates and report exceptional GDP growth, or tally the latest trade figures in this archetypal of emerging markets. And as I listen to their cries I cannot tell if they're made of hope or of mourning.

An old junior high school friend of mine, who is Tibetan, has as his facebook status "It takes 49 years for a soul to be reborn, and 49 years for a..."