the pain of Tibet....

"Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I'm doing a lot of research recently, you'll see... [the]  crude face of political domination. You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about: 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. This young man's father had been a scribe to the Panchen Lama. That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. His mother was incarcerated for the crime of being wealthy. He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn't bear to be without him. The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold."

- Wade Davis, excerpt from the 2003 TED Talk Dreams from Endangered Cultures

on the failure of walls....

Photo of Lhasa, Tibet by Wade Davis. 2015
See more here.

Wade Davis, in his brilliant 2003 TED Talk entitled Dreams from Endangered Cultures, concluded with the following remarks:

“And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of us who've travelled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all. They're homelands of somebody. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope.”

This is something I learned travelling in Tibet last summer. That there’s no such thing as “remote.” That a place I’d always understood to be isolated and inaccessible was once a major stop on the Silk Road, where the cross-pollination of cultures and peoples is still evident everywhere. In multiple languages — indeed multiple alphabets — on every sign. In the multiple types of foods on menus — Mandarin, yes. But also, Tibetan, Indian, Szechuan, Thai and even “English.” In multiple forms of traditional dress and hair styles. In still more adaptations of “modern” dress.

I realized that Tibet is a whole lot less insular than, say, Beijing -- a place that is absolutely stunning in its cultural homogeneity.

Because there is no “remote” anymore, and maybe there never was.

Walls are a failed experiment in human history.