Rev. Danny Fisher

Photo by Dana Warner Fisher.
I voted today in the North Carolina primary. If you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably noticed that I tend to move around a lot. As such, and because my stuff is in storage with my parents in Greensboro, I’m registered in North Carolina.

I just moved out of New Haven, CT, this past week, and am now back with my parents in Greensboro until I hear back about some jobs I’ve applied for. Obviously, I returned just in time for today’s primary.

I won’t be discussing which presidential candidate I voted for. Do I think it’s important who gets the job? Of course–it’s vitally important. Do I have a strong opinion about who the best person for the job is? You’d better believe it. (I even gave money to a campaign.) But I’m a religious leader of sorts. I pass myself off as something like that, anyway. (Though it looks like I’ll be a totally legit, ordained Buddhist minister before the year is out.) And I tend to think it’s not a very good idea for religious leaders to publicly endorse candidates. Sure, they have a right to do it so long as they don’t do it inside of a church. But would anyone listen to them if they weren’t throwing around the religious leader thing at least a little bit? It’s all kind of murky to me. It just doesn’t make me comfortable to endorse a candidate here.

Issues, though, are certainly the providence of religious persons. In fact, I think we as Buddhists should speak up more on certain issues. If I may take a page from the Karl Barth playbook, I’d like to suggest that the Dharma in America should be preached with the zafu in one hand and the newspaper in the other. As I told a Jamaican radio station last year, the Buddha’s Dharma is a Social Dharma–make no mistake about it. You can count on me to continue writing about the environment, the war, health care, and other issues here.

This blog sure isn’t a church (or temple or Dharma center). And I’m not an ordained anything yet. But I’m not going to start doing something that I think is kind of a bad habit for a religious leader. Besides, whoever gets the job as the forty-forth President of the United States, I’m probably going to have to get on his or her case from time to time. That’s part of being an issues guy.

So while I’m not going to tell you who I voted for and why, I will encourage you to do a lot of reading, researching, and thinking about the candidates. And, you know, make sure to vote. If you didn’t vote in your primary…well, do it next time. (Remember that people died so we could all get to do it.) And make sure you register to vote in December. You can do so now right here.

The Washington Post today has a great feature about the 41-year-old Tibetan writer Woeser, who lives in Beijing and willingly risks her freedom by chronicling the crackdown on Tibetans at a blog hosted by a server in the U.S.

As Olympic torchbearers prepare to scale the Tibetan side of Mount Everest and envoys of the Dalai Lama have begun informal talks with their Chinese counterparts over the current crisis in Tibet, a global battle rages over how to interpret what is happening in the remote Himalayan region. But almost entirely absent from the discussion are voices of Tibetans living within Tibet, the people who can describe everyday life and let others judge whether they are being wronged.

“The main voice is hers,” said Robbie Barnett, director of modern Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York. “She is one of the very, very few Tibetans who have been able to put their name to the discussion and have managed to stay afloat.”

Woeser’s writing finds no favor in the Chinese government. Her books are banned here and three different blogs she maintained on Chinese servers have been shut down in the past two years — on government orders, a friend at one of the Internet companies told her. Her current blog, http://woeser.middle-way.net, is hosted on a computer server in the United States, but even that one temporarily succumbed to an attack April 26.

“It’s not only me. Many scholars do not have freedom of speech. Their blogs and Web sites are also blocked,” Woeser said in a telephone interview from her 20th-floor apartment in China’s capital. Although her house arrest has been lifted, officials from the local security bureau keep watch at her building, and she says she is often followed.

“This reflects the Chinese government’s strict control over speech,” she said. “They don’t want me to leave this kind of record, to talk about what happened in Tibet in a real way. This voice is what the government does not want to hear.”

If you have a moment, be sure to read Jill Drew’s whole piece about this extraordinarily brave woman.

The above is courtesy of our stringer Erick: satellite images taken by the NASA MODIS program show the Irrawaddy region of Myanmar before Cyclone Nargis (at left) and after Cyclone Nargis (at right).

Visit http://www.burmaitcantwait.org.