Internet, Interrupted

The Myanmar government has eliminated one of their biggest enemies with the flip of a switch, by simply cutting off the nation's internet access, according to The New York Times. The result of an all-too-conveniently timed virus, Myanmar's two internet service providers have been crippled, ending a recent flood of images showing the world the government's brutality against protestors and Buddhist monks.

When I have a question - about a recipe, or a geographical location, job openings, the reliability of the T on any given day, whatever - I don't call my mom, or consult an atlas, or the classifieds, or the MBTA. I Google it. I communicated to my internship supervisor for three months this summer without ever dialing the telephone - our correspondence relied solely on e-mails. I don't pay for newspapers, I read all of my print news online.

And someone has the power to turn that off. We would like to believe in the United States, and in other free countries around the world, that power lies less in one person than in countries like Myanmar and Nepal, where the then-government took similar actions in 2005. But what happened in Myanmar is not only a hand over the mouth of it's citizens, it's cotton in the ears of the world. What they cannot tell us, we cannot hear, and though I still have full access to the internet, there is nothing I can do, with all of my government-granted rights and freedoms, to gain access to the reality of what is happening in Myanmar.

It's a beautiful country that many Americans know nothing, or very little, about. There is a great video by an American who lived in Myanmar that shows a little of Rangoon and the culture there...watch it here or learn more about U Jon Gyi here.

Peace.