Plus ca change...

Why no street protests? Why no marching? Has the fire gone out of their souls?
"You sound as if you are a foreigner," said a Mandalay acquaintance to me with an arched eyebrow, when I posed the question to him.
I asked the same of everyone I met, on a recent trip to Burma, even if the answer was palpably obvious. In Rangoon, you only had to glance toward the Shwedagon Pagoda, that "winking wonder," as Rudyard Kipling put it, whose golden peak rises from the city's urban cacophany as a beacon of constancy amid the shifting caprices of successive military autocrats. It was from here, in Sept. 2007, that a sea of monks swaddled in maroon togas poured down into the streets to protest a rise in fuel prices, only to be mowed down by security forces. The trauma lingers.
Besides, Burmese told me, a beloved leader's protracted fate holds less urgency then coping with day to day material concerns.
"Love is love, love is not a food price," said the rocker fugitive head of the subversive underground opposition network, Generation Wave, as we chatted one rainy afternoon in a Rangoon coffee parlor "The trial does’t affect them."
To cite one cheap example of Burmese poverty, and this in a country that once ranked as Asia's wealthiest, inflation in 2008 hovered at 27%, which puts it at 216th out of 222 states in the CIA's global inflation rankings.

Still, it's been a long couple of months. In the interim, protests erupted in Tehran, turned bloody, then fell out of the headlines as fast.
Burmese, of course, watched with typical comparative thoughtfulness from afar. Here's what I gathered at the time. And as it happens, of course it's still relevant. Stagnation, after all, is a ready ingredient of autocracies...

Rangoon, Burma -- With their eyes fixed on the bloody tumult in Tehran, inhabitants of these silent, monsoon-darkened streets ponder revolution of a different sort.
For weeks, the stillness in Burma’s former capital, Rangoon, has masked deep anguish about the trial of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi who languishes for the second consecutive month in the city’s Insein Prison in a protracted trial that most see as a twisted legal pretext to keep her behind bars ahead of parliamentary elections next year whom Burmese refer to simply and in whispers as “the Lady.” Aung San Suu Kyi has spent the last 13 of 19 years under house arrest.
“This is very painful for us,” said a social activist who works in HIV/AIDs, at a Rangoon tea shop. He paused a moment and gazed toward the golden peak of Shwedagon Pagoda that pierced through a shifting vapor of monsoon clouds, as if he were gathering solace from the sight. A frog lumbered past his feet. The trial, he said, was “a kind of insult to the people. Someone said we deserve this government because we don’t have the courage. There is a feeling that they will totally crack down.”
Burmese view events in Iran with the hindsight of past failed protests, all brutally suppressed. But even for the most hard-bitten of the country’s clandestine opposition activists, dreams of toppling the junta from the streets have instead yielded a new pragmatism, and a powerful search for a new way.
In recent days, the military junta’s mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, has drowned out news from Teheran with articles on bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is an old trick for us, for they did that kind of stuff back in the beginning weeks of Iraq Invasion,” said a Rangoon resident. “We called the New Light of Myanmar the New Light of Baghdad and the other paper, the Mirror of Iraq.”
But Burmese say they are acutely conscious of unfolding events in the Middle East, accustomed to tuning into banned foreign radio outlets and using proxy servers to bypass blocks in the hundreds of internet cafes that have sprung up in recent months across the country. Meanwhile, some of the nearly 200 private journals published in Rangoon and Mandalay have seized on Iran as a news story from which to subtly pass messages through the censors to their readers.
“What we, the private media, are trying to do was to put in as much stories and pixs of what's going on in Teheran in our papers. So far we were successful. The upcoming paper of mine… will carry, albeit if it's not censored, news stories of the events in Teheran and a feature on 'Elections and Democracy," trying to draw some parallels between the one in Iran the upcoming one here,” said an editor of a weekly publication, referring to elections in 2010 for a new constitution that critics widely dismiss as a sham. “I'm still waiting till Friday whether it will be censored or not...”

“About Iran, I can't say whether their current movement will change the political trend or not,” said Moe Thway, a rocker with red-streaked hair who co-founded of Generation Wave, one of Burma’s most shadowy and creative clandestine opposition networks. “But I can surely say that this movement will be carry on toward changes. It can be a start at least…But Iran and our Burma are still different.”
In recent weeks, Moe Thway has been among the ragged and diffuse groups of Burma’s semi-underground opposition activists trying to stir action by passing out subversive pamphlets or photographs of Aung San Suu Kyi.
But Iran’s citizens are not nearly as depressed and despairing as in Burma, said Generation Wave’s Moe Thway, echoing a sentiment widespread among residents. In Burma, nostalgia for the student-led pro-democracy uprising of 1988 was conclusively smashed nearly two years ago. In Sept. 2007, the military junta ordered forces to open fire on a sea of Buddhist monks and lay residents who had poured into the streets from the marble steps of Rangoon’s Shwedagon to protest an overnight doubling of fuel prices.
If hope of change exists, Burmese glimpse it in the burgeoning of civil society, or the slow creep of grassroots activism. Overtly political opposition groups and many more apolitical networks have in recent months emerged with a focus on a strategy of evolutionary change, carefully reaching out to educate the country’s rural masses and working to strengthen their sense of civic engagement ahead of the 2010 elections.
“We cannot go directly to our goal,” said a graphic designer who co-founded a group that teaches social management and governance in Rangoon and remote towns under the cover of English classes. “We must move forward because here we have a lack of democratic culture. So I started my organization to start informal education….”
But the groups tread a careful line between politics and social work to meet their goals without harassment from authorities.
At first light on a recent Sunday, a dozen physicians piled into two vans and headed out from central Rangoon to dispatch free medicine and consultations to villagers an hour away in a tiny squat of bamboo and straw-thatch huts down a dirt path among watery rice paddies.
The group first came together during the Sept. 2007 protests to care for the demonstrators who had been beaten by security forces. Then, in May 2008, Tropical Cyclone Nargis hit Burma with a trail of devastation, killing 140,000 people. While the junta dragged its feet and rebuffed foreign aid workers, the physicians were among countless Burmese who shuttered their shops or clinics, closed their textbooks or froze their printing presses for the space of a few days to throw together bags of rice, cooking oil or whatever supplies they could muster to bring to the ravaged villagers.
Like many of those unofficial ad hoc groups, the Rangoon physicians have since developed a informal nonprofit, alternating weekends with work in an orphanage and seven villages on the outskirts of Rangoon. The group’s founder, a doctor with a busy private medical practice in a leafy residential maze of Rangoon streets, managed to secure funding from a foreign nonprofit and named the shifting team of twentysomethings to sixtysomethings the “Volunteers for the Vulnerable.”
“Not even all our members know the name of the group,” said the founder. Instead he negotiates with government authorities to have access to the village using the cover of a Buddhist monastery.
But it’s not just glorified welfare work.
The day change comes, the founder said, “the Lady will lead. But we will lead too. We will organize at the township level.”