I remember these guys coming to my school and dumping a bunch of sand on the table. It was supposed to be impressive or something. They were sold as exiled monks who just wanted to be holy and practice their religion. It was dumb. The world wasn't going to be worse off without their sand art and if they wanted to do it and we cared so much they could do it here, but it didn't seem reasonable at the time that China was banning sand art or quietly humming to yourself. I found a video of the Dali Lama and didn't see a man with sacred knowledge. The idea of picking some random child to be the pope of the mountain was never sufficiently romantic enough to make me care.

It's like the people who say China was oppressing them for doing yoga in the park. "That's all we were doing, I swear". You've got to be a certain kind of person to buy this.

I'm going to Cuba just as soon as my passport comes in. I'm so done. There's not much left to save here.

// as an aside, I just watched the last of us. Great show, but this sort of world isn't what people here think people would be like after the apocalypse. It's how they think they already are. It's not just the government that's the problem. There's something wrong with people. They are stupid, pig-headed, servile, fantasy minded people who hate and fear everything and everyone but their masters. The whole lot of them, and there's nothing to be done about it.