I'm not the kind of guy to tend to salute anybody or anything; however, in this case, that sounds downright stupid.

There are some incredibly brave people fighting for a cause larger than themselves in Burma right now, and I'm at loss what to say. Except: my thoughts are with you; you are doing the right thing, and I salute you, knowing that many of you will perish in the struggle. All because you know that eventually, freedom will win, and sometimes there is no other choice than to stand up and be counted even if that means what it means in Burma today.

Many years ago I spent an incredible week hiking in the jungles of the Golden Triangle, a mountainous area largely cut off from the world in the north west of Thailand, bordering Burma. With "cut off" I mean having a day or two to hike to the next road on trails that I could not even see, from where you'd take 4 hours by pickup to the next meaningful town. And I mean poverty so intense that metal for things such as nails or window hinges was literally unheard of, that the entire village (and I mean "entire") lined up to look through the binoculars of one of us — both ways — and that the entire villege couldn't come up with two dollars worth of change.

Every night, we stayed at a different village. Almost all of them were established in the middle of the jungle by refugees who had snuck over the border from Burma. Hosting some adventurous tourists every couple of weeks was a way of making money for them. I particularly remember one village chief who actually had studied in the UK, and gave us 15 or so blissfully ignorant young European tourists a passionate speech about the prosecution they all faced under the military dictatorship in Burma. (He never once used the term Myanmar, which is what the junta wants the country to be called.)

Enough said. Wear red tomorrow, and spend a few minutes.