If you’ve been following the recent news, you know that Tibet is having a terrible time right now. (If you don’t, the BBC has a good rundown.)

I’ve been trying to find the words to express how angry and sad and frustrated I have been since this violence started.  It is a very strange feeling to look at pictures coming out of Lhasa and recognize in the burnt-out shells places I and my classmates passed every day for three weeks. Yahoo has an extensive photo gallery of Lhasa and Tibetan protests. In the rubble, so far I’ve recognized a teashop in which I got a wonderful cup of tea, a little Chinese dumpling shop that would belch out the noxious fumes of cooking cabbage and unidentifiable meat, and various shops near the Barkhor. Of course, we can’t contact any of the people we met in Tibet, so we don’t know if they are safe or not.

(more…)

Yesterday the Dalai Lama accepted the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can give to a civilian.

His speech and the speeches of others at the ceremony reemphasize that he is not a “splittist,” as Beijing claims, but simply a crusader for peace. He restated that it is not independence he is after, but actual autonomy, something the “Tibet Autonomous Region” utterly lacks. He thanks the American people for their support, and is rather politic in thanking the Bushies for their “support of religious freedom” (heehee, I don’t think he’s been reading the US news much…).

(more…)