and as much as the still stoic communist regime would like the world to believe this event never actually happened, let me assure you: IT FUCKING HAPPENED.
when i lived in china i was sorta ornery in that i often prompted folks to talk to me about taboo subjects like tiananmen. i was careful to only do so if the participant was willing, and i met LOTS of folks who described those days back in '89 with lots of heart and lots of tears.
it was a fucking disgrace what the government did to those people.
never forget.
never fucking forget.
"When you let people do whatever they want, you get Woodstock. When you let governments do whatever they want, you get Auschwitz." ~ Doug Newman
ReplyDeleteI remember. I was a kid obsessed and concerned with cold war history and politics and 1989 was suddenly a year of revolution and hope. By the time word reached the states of the Chinese students protesting too, everything seemed so possible...and then the massacre and the footage they aired later. I literally cried. Late summer and fall renewed my sense of optimism with more revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall, but not fully. The conversations you had must have been amazing, really tough to take sometimes, but amazing.
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