The lowdown on my arrest in China

As you probably are quite aware of, I have supported the non-violent struggle for political and religious freedom in Tibet for over a dozen years. I joined Students for a Free Tibet a few months after they started, and I watched them grow from a dozen chapters in high schools and colleges in the US to thousands of chapters worldwide. I was their first Regional Director and then Sector Coordinator for the entire tri-state region. So, this is not only a cause I feel close to, it's something that I have pledged a good portion of my life supporting.

After nine days in China, on August 9th I took part in a demonstration in Tiananmen Square. This was not a spur of the moment action - on the contrary, I spent three months training for it! We were arrested and held for eight hours before being deported from China. I made my point clear to the interrogating officers: this was NOT a protest against the Chinese people. Instead, it was a protest against the Chinese Government.

Were we successful?? You bet! We managed to shift the attention of the Olympics from China's glitz and glamour to the real situation inside China. And almost every day, news headlines around the world mentioned our protests. Just our protest had a HUGE amount of press - CNN, NY Times, etc... my Grandmother called my mother at 8am because she saw an article in the NY Daily News!!

Here is a short video of the action:

Tiananmen “Tibet Die-in” Protest 080908 from Students for a Free Tibet on Vimeo.

Here is a long video of the protest (I strongly suggest watching this one!)


Here are some pictures from the action, the rest are at http://louiss19.winkflash.com/ :









Thanks for reading!!

From "Taming the Mind" by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Basically, like the Buddha, we are trying to get to the truth. We're trying to find out the basic truth about what is going on so that we have some perspective on life. We want to be able to say, "I finally ifgured out my life. It's taken me a long time, but I've finally figured it out. I did. I've figured out what I'm going to do with my life, the meaning of my life. I've figured out the value of family, friendship, love, and work." Yet these questions are always on our mind: What is going on? What is it that makes me get up in the morning? What is it that takes me from conversation to conversation, from thought to thought, from pain to pain, from pleasure to pleasure, throughout my life?

Welcome to my new blog

Hello! Welcome to version 4 (?) of my blog/online journal.

The first one was the blog at my old record company, Discipline Global Mobile, but I cannot seem to find it and so two years of entries such as "Still on tour, still having fun!" are now missing.

My next blog is still available at http://esterling.livejournal.com/ , which I used from 2002-2006 and is still online.

After that, I moved it to my myspace page, which I kept somewhat updated until recently. I got somewhat bored of myspace and started spending more time on facebook (and outside, in the non-cyber world) which is the reason for the low number of entries this year.

Sooooo....here we are!! The new place for my thoughts, to share with you. If you have any advice how to correctly use blogger, please share them with me. Subscribe to my page, if you want! And feel free to leave comments!

Love,
Evan

Trying this out

This work?