One of the very good things about journaling is that the journalist (I'm a bit self-conscious with the word to describe myself, but I think journaler may not even be a word.) doesn't have any rules except the ones that are self-imposed... The journal writing today has nothing to do with today's photo du jour, except for my guessing that Dave Ehrhardt holds my Burmese Hero in high regard, as I do.
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Occasionally I attend a very private celebration, not an event exactly but a happening; and what happens at these affairs is so private that I am on these occasions the only one present. The happening may be nothing more than a walk or a sit or a stare into the sunset with all the rhetoric delivered inside my head... to me from me. Today I pay homage to DAW AUNG SAN SUU KYI, one of the heroes of my generation... well, that’s a bit of a stretch. She actually belongs to the generation moving up through time after me... and at age seventy-five, I add quickly with feeling that she is only sixty-five this week as she is finally permitted to walk free from house arrest in her native Myanmar.

I celebrate because she doesn’t cut and run from challenges to democracy in her own country. She doesn’t simply pack up and go when civil rights and human rights are denied and violated in her country. I know how strong the impulse is to get out, just to go away to some other place. I did it once. I ran away to another country. JFK and RFK and MLK, heroes of my youth, had been killed in my own country, and a governor had been elected in my state who, in his first week in office, closed all the mental health out-patient clinics in California which resulted directly in the suicide of a bright student in the school where I was teaching. He should have lived. He would be fifty-eight-years-old now. Looking back on that time, I have no regrets nor any remorse about leaving my country because that wouldn’t change anything in the past, and wouldn’t make the present or future any brighter. I have heard myself saying lately that if some absurd political wind blows someone like Sarah Palin into the White House, I couldn’t stand it. And then I think of Mrs. Ang San Suu Kyi and I am embarrassed. She has family, grown children, in England where she could be comforted and comfortable. She has a brother in San Diego. I think I could arrange a hero’s welcome if she were to relocate to our city; but she won’t come. She has work to do in Myanmar. She faces the possibility of the return to house arrest, but she will do what she has to do.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s father Aung San, a general in the Burmese Army negotiated Burma’s independence from the British Empire in 1947 and was later assassinated by a faction in the army. She had two brothers, one of whom died at age eight and the older brother who emigrated to San Diego and became a U.S. citizen. Suu Kyi, a Theravada Buddhist, was educated in Methodist English High School in Rangoon. Her mother became a significant political figure in the newly formed Burmese government. Suu Kyi followed her mother out of the country when she was appointed Burmese ambassador to India and Nepal in 1960. Suu Kyi was educated after high school at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, followed eventually by a Ph.D. at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science . She married Dr. Michael Aris, a scholar of Tibetan culture, and they had two sons, Alexander and Kim, both British citizens. She went back to Burma when her mother became ill. Su Kyi was put under house arrest because her advocacy for democracy was a threat to the military junta in power. During her house arrest her husband and sons were refused permission to visit her. Her husband died in 1999 on his 53rd birthday of prostate cancer never having been permitted to enter Burma to visit his wife. While under house arrest she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

You may remember Cyclone Nargis in 2008. It blew the roof off the delapidated lake residence where she lived under house arrest, and she lived with candles for light at night until she was given permission to have repairs made in 2009. She wasn’t allowed to have a generator, but apparently that problem was solved about a year before her release from house arrest.

...and all those years, I have been free to live as I wish in our amazing country and to visit almost any other place in the world that I wish to go. I am in awe of this diminutive woman who stands up to despots boldly and with dignity. So today, November 14th, her first full day of freedom is Aung San Suu Kyi Day in my calendar.