tagged w/ Berlin Twitter Wall
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For many of us, the fall of the Berlin Wall was something we never truly understood the significance of until we learned about it in school. It happened in our lives, but not at a point when we could include it as an historical moment that impacted us--it was too distant.
Oppression in China, on the other hand, was happening then and is still happening now, writes YPNation contributor Genevieve Long. This is of our generation, and we can't be passive about it:
"As a journalist, I have interviewed many people who escaped from China to the United States. One woman lost her husband because he was murdered for being a Falun Gong practitioner. While she suffered a very specific loss, the broad strokes of her story are all too commonplace in China—people are persecuted for their spiritual beliefs, political ideologies, blogging, or running websites on banned topics (i.e. democracy), to name a few. Transgressions from the communist party line aren’t tolerated any more today than they were 20 years ago. But it’s a bigger game of cat and mouse with the advent of the Internet.
"With that in mind, I had to know what the panelists thought about the Berlin Twitter Wall, set up by a German non-profit as a way for people to virtually express their sentiments on the anniversary of the fall of communism in Europe. There were more than 2,000 tweets from people inside Mainland China, many raging for the dream of freedom, in 140 characters or less. It didn’t take long for the site to be blocked by the Great Firewall of China, and tweets from a country of 1.3 billion people ceased."
Read her story: http://bit.ly/4usPTTFor many of us, the fall of the Berlin Wall was something we never truly understood... more
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