August 13, 1999
ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL
A Certain Contagion
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The choice of subject for this column was difficult for me to make,
journalistically and personally.
Should I, must I, write at once
about the shooting of the children in
Los Angeles, about the murders, in
our own land, of people because they
were Jews, or blacks, or gay or students, or worked in an abortion clinic, and so had to be killed?
Yes, of course, I told myself for
two days, not just for news importance but in self-defense. The other
killers that American Nazism has
spawned will never stop hunting
Jews, blacks and the other targets.
The least we can do is use all our
national and personal legal power
and strength to track them down
before they spill more of their evil
passions to spill more of our blood.
But then I knew I did not want to
write about the Los Angeles shootings
for this particular column and would
not. The reason is that I had planned
to write about the power, in a man I
know, of human goodness. If I wrote
this column about the killer, his evil
would, for this day in this space, conquer my friend and his value to the
world, and I could not permit that.
We all know that evil is contagious.
But most of us do not talk or write
about the contagiousness of goodness.
When we do we mince around it, as if
the thought were embarrassing.
The mixture of decency and determination in my friend, and his spirituality -- another word we duck --
produces the aura of plain goodness.
Armed with that and nothing else, he
has saved a small nation and its
religion from spiritual extinction by
a huge neighbor. He has attracted
around the world a peaceful army of
men and women who work separately or together to help his people preserve their identity.
His name is Tenzin Gyatso and he
is the Dalai Lama of Tibet, visiting
and teaching in New York City for a
few days. He has been admired worldwide for almost a half-century, ever
since he escaped from Tibet after it
was occupied by Communist China.
Wherever he goes, he is eagerly
welcomed by the people and painstakingly ignored by governments.
Beijing has warned national leaders
of the price to be paid for supporting
him. It terrifies them -- less trade
with China.
To be infected by evil or affected
by goodness, governments and people have to have a receptivity to
them. The men who run China or
other dictatorships cannot have the
receptivity to what goodness demands -- abandonment of repression
of the people they rule. That would
mean the end of the Politburo's control apparatus, and of its members.
So, having killed a million Tibetans,
burned thousands of temples, arrested tens of thousands of monks, nuns
and peaceful freedom fighters, followed military invasion with a Chinese civilian takeover, Beijing cannot
conceive of another way to govern its
colony while remaining in power.
At his hotel, the Dalai Lama told
me that oppression had tightened.
Monks and nuns are forced to choose
between immersing themselves in
Communist political education and
being ousted from monasteries and
convents, often into jail.
The capital of Lhasa and other
cities, he said, now have more Chinese than Tibetans. His people must
carry on their daily affairs speaking
Chinese, not Tibetan, and scrabble
for droppings of work not gobbled by
Chinese newcomers.
For Tibetans he asks not independence but autonomy, the self-rule over
their lives that the West has demanded -- and fought wars to attain -- for
so many other countries.
In June 1998 China's President
promised America's on world TV
that Beijing would finally talk with
the Dalai Lama.
Never happened, the Dalai Lama
said. Even Chinese back-channel
contacts Beijing had permitted were
cut dead. Breaking the promise was
a direct insult to President Clinton.
He does not seem to mind.
Once, in India, I asked the Dalai
Lama if he ever got angry. Not anymore, he said; it benefited the Chinese more than it did him.
He is a muscular man of robust
voice, who loves to laugh. He reciprocates respect and affection with a
generosity possessed only by the
strong of soul.
Alone, Tibet cannot achieve autonomous breathing room. But the Dalai
Lama has made millions around the
world believe in the power of goodness in the individual.
In return, they
give him a determination that one
day Tibet will be free, or freer. Meantime, they will help its cause, and
stand by its people.