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Completely agree. Always the same excuse - bring up the past to defend the present. More than 125 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since March 2011[1], including three in the past week [2] (37-yr-old monk, 20-yr-old woman, and a 34-yr-old man) to protest against this repressive Chinese occupation. As a Tibetan, the past protests and these self-immolations are heart-wrenching and at the Toronto vigil this past weekend, there were people in tears. It's just hard. We live in this amazing world and yet we have all these geopolitical issues (Eastern Europe, Middle East, Tibet, Kashmir, etc.) caused by various factors we vehemently believe/oppose (we humans have an brilliant capacity to rationalize any of our actions/beliefs). This past summer, I traveled across Kashmir with my two high school friends to visit the areas where the Indo-Pakistani[3] and Sino-Indian[4] wars took place. The landscape was beautiful, especially in the Ladakh regions. But overall, these regions are occupied by villages and small towns dwarfed by the huge military bases. Why can't these local people live by themselves without the fear of another war? Most of you already know, it's the same textbook example: a new ruler comes in town, finds the need to distract/rally his or her country - what better than a war (this "war" could be extended to politics/tech/biz, not just the old Roman wars)? History is littered with the similar plots and it works every single time. Sometimes, I wonder if an ET contact would be good for our world so we could put down our differences and realize we are all in this together so we could take care of each other, our neighbors, and our amazing planet! Also, solving Fermi's paradox [5] would be icing on the cake! [1]http://freetibet.org/news-media/na/full-list-self-immolation...
[2]http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/26/uk-china-tibet-idUK...
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_wars_and_confli...
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_War
[5]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796270 |