Burma Related News - June 12, 2001.
Most societies undergo a generational pattern of defining experience.
This might be a war, worldwide as in the 1940s, or more localized, as later in Vietnam. It could be an economic cycle-the disheartening depths of depression years or, conversely, the irrational exuberance of a boom's gilded age. For the country as a whole metaphorically, and for thousands more in a very literal sense, the clank of the iron-barred prison door may well be the collective memory. It doesn't take much to earn cell space in Burma. Direct political activity certainly makes the ruling junta see red.