A Day in the Life of Chaos

When an American looks at Asia they often view the region as one big exotic place filled with people that look the same and are all sort of “Chinese.”  It is only after you live or travel here that you truly come to understand the tremendous variation between the region and its people. At times these ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious and political differences combine to make westerners seem as if they are the ones that are the same. The differences between a French, White American, German, English or Italian start to seem so small in the eyes of an Asian and we are typically racially grouped together in much the same way.  The Thais even have a word for it, Farang.  The term Farang envelopes all white skinned western folk and places them into a single class of foreigner. President Tran Dai Quang I recently completed my third trip to Vietnam, a region of the world I am still struggling to define.  The land is in a word fascinating.  It is an inconvenient land.  One tha

There are places in the world where beauty defies expectation.  Sometimes they are found unexpectedly in the smallest of things or the most unpredictable moments. When I awoke at 5:30 in the morning in my bed not far from the junction where northern Thailand, Laos and Burma meet I rolled over and looked out the window of my hotel room.  I was physically quite close to a place romantically and once nephariously called the Golden Triangle. It was place of lore, once known as the central hub of heroin trafficking across a remote section of South East Asia.  Now it was a region filled with economic development.  The jungle trails and combat fatigue clad mercenary armies have been replaced by casinos and Chinese tourists.  The men who once commanded heroin movement from their jungle bases now run multimillion dollar gambling empires.  The traffickers are still there, they are just woven into the fabric of economic development and their camouflaged clothing has been replaced by a veil o

I have been having an ongoing conversation with my father about the Occupy Wall Street protests going on around the nation and how they compare to the protests of the 60's.  I was born in the 60's, 1967 to be exact and less then a year later Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both dead.  I wish I could say I remember it but I believe I was likely more concerned with the flavor of my creamed spinach.  As a result in order to gain perspective I have turned to someone that was much more cognizant of the changes going on in the nation.  In an odd way, we tend to remember the period with some nostalgia yet my father reminds me that it was the seeming hopelessness of it all that drove both him and my mother independently of each other to migrate to Alaska. Bloody Sunday, Selma AL I wanted to know if the protests of the 60's as undefined and counter culture as they were, had an impact on public policy.  My father's conclusions were that they did and he listed a