monks, the price of energy, and the seperation of church and state

YANGON, Myanmar - The government said its security forces opened fire Wednesday on demonstrators who failed to disperse, killing one person, and witnesses said police beat and dragged away dozens of Buddhist monks in the most violent crackdown in a month of protests in Myanmar...read the rest here

you know, the monks actually started marching in protest to the treatment of another monk, but when gas prices rose, the people came out to march along side, and they are now using this movement to try and change the unjust reality of rising living costs...and monks have the energy to devote to this type of movement, they have the spiritual resource to motivate The People

i wonder why here, in america, we can read about the increasing costs of energy this winter (and the fact that people making minimum wage will need to spend 20 % of their income on heat, where as the rich will only pay 3 %) and not care enough to hit the streets after reading about the violence some people will endure to fight the people who keep them down...and one thing i think of is the way churches and synagogues (and maybe other religious institutions) are now given government funds for their congregations....so to motivate their parishoners to fight against the things that keep them down is against their own best interest....because if i remember correctly, religious institutions were heavily involved in all the successful movements in the united states...ofcourse, bush now financially has say in what they do....the monks are not controlled by the goevernment at all...

we are none of us "entilted" to be rich, money is something we need to work for and fancy cars and big houses and cable t.v. are luxuries that we will not alll be able to have, but if youre working for your money (as i believe most people working for minimum wage are), then you have the right to demand that the cost of necessities be regulated or that fair wages be kept in line with inflation....it is ridiculous to me that the number of millionaires we have in this country has increased as much as it has because the POLARITY to that much wealth is increased levels of poverty (the money aint coming from nothing, its coming from us normal folks, our pockets, as the value of a ceo rises and the value of a worker is to outsource to countries where they do not have to pay fair wages legally)...

i know heating costs isnt as sexy as brittany or 50 cent, but it sure means a whloe lot more to the world in the long run

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