Based On True Stories
Until a year ago, reading the news turned me off. Having to comb through a long-winded news article, or even study a news photograph, had either exhausted or bored me intensely. Working at the Times had improved that marginally, but digesting the news was still limited to work.
Since embarking on the research for The Shirt Project, however, the news has become a resource I can’t get enough of.
The struggle in Myanmar, the subject of our second and next shirt to be printed, is a story that I’ve been steadily turning and teasing on paper. It seemed impenetrable, as the long Wikipedia article would suggest. The protest and subsequent crackdown is just another episode in a series of repetitive events that have been unraveling for the past five or six decades.
But as the complex relationships between Myanmar’s people emerge from the stories, it’s difficult not to feel a trace amount of empathy. Myanmar is a country that detests its administration as much as it needs it. Not unlike a dysfunctional family, and only so different from our own. The reality of the monks’ and working class’ struggle becomes diluted in photographs, sound bytes, and the written word. Every unit of energy spent in their struggle against the junta forms a particle in a news story, articulated and packaged for consumption.
The themes in Myanmar’s story which shine through this process, however, are all too familiar. All the haunting elements—escalating gas prices, a superstitious administration, and a largely uninformed population—find subtly altered, mirror versions in our country. The only difference is that here in the States, we are able to wait out our government until next year.
The story that encompasses Myanmar’s contention between its people and administration is not such a different flavor from the American one. They are here, and they are being told… even if no one is listening.
Post a comment