THAT THING WAS YOU

Today was the 59th anniversary of the creation of the sovereign state of Sri Lanka, known previously as Ceylon under British colonial rule. Today, like most other days in Sri Lanka, there is much in the news of those who seek to form another sovereign state on the South Asian island. "Those" would be the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who seek to create the state of Tamil Eelam in the Sri Lankan north to be a homeland for the native Tamil language group, seperate from the Sri Lankan Sinhalese language group. There are of course a number of ways to see this struggle -- as an instance of an Indo-Aryan language group oppressing a Dravidian group, as violent renegades creating terror, as just another far-off dispute out of western reckoning -- but in any case I'd like to think that on American independence day we would have thoughts on struggles for freedom on our own soil, so I feel that it is prudent to give the story of the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankans a little air today.*

Not too far from East India, in the People's Republic of China, it was the 55th birthday of Li Yinhe, a sociologist and sexologist who devotes much study to the sexual norms of the nation, a topic with just as much resonance in our own American home front. And while we are back on these familiar shores, it was also both the 1st anniversary of the death of, and the would-be 86th birthday of second-wave American feminist Betty Friedan, who studied gender roles in our own society decades ago.

And here in Bellingham, it was the 22nd birthday of your noble blogger Mike. I celebrated by pondering social issues abroad and at home, and by being with some of my very favorite people in the world. Today was a very good birthday, and perhaps will even go down with the previously mentioned historical events as a revolution, a triumph of good times over the oppression of bummed-outness and the formation of the new state of 22 Year Old Mike-istan.


*The 4th of February has actually been historically a prolific day for revolutions, reform movements, and the like. In 1861, six states first formed the Confederate States of America. In 1969, Yasser Arafat first took the reigns of the PLO. The SLA kidnapped Paty Hearst in 1974. Hugo Chavez staged a coup d'etat in Venezuala in 1992, and was elected president of the nation exactly seven years later. And, in 2000, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia became Serbia and Montenegro, a country that would be further revised in identity six years later (though for once not on this day) as the seperate states of Serbia and Montenegro.