5/23/22, 1:44 AM Discipline and duty - New Mandala Discipline and duty MATT SCH ISSLER , GUEST CONTRIB UTOR - 10 MAR , 2015 Image source. Banner image source. Tonight, students are barricaded in a monastery outside Yangon. A few weeks ago, I sat with friends and colleagues in a teashop near where a branch of the Irrawaddy River sidles past Pathein Town. Passing the night with talk and tea, my colleague suddenly interjected: hey, Matt, there is a fire in your township. I leaned over the corner of the small table to read the screen on her phone; the fire was in my township, but the Facebook post said that it was across another branch of the Irrawaddy River. No danger for my friends or my apartment, that was clear. But the village name and extent of the fire was less clear; each of the three stories that we read online differed. Different village names, different sizes of fire; a boat fleeing the flames had sunk in the middle of the river, too. All hands lost! Maybe. Worried though relieved, I excused myself to check with friends back in the city. Standing outside hoping for a connection not yet fatigued by the teashop’s metal roof, my call fought its way through. The conversation lasted long enough for Aung Aung to confirm the fire. I stood in the dark and looked at trash in the muddy canal. A second call lasted long enough to confirm everything in our ward was okay. Third and fourth calls dropped. I left the issue to rest and went inside for more tea. Last week, Myanmar police forces blockaded student demonstrators in a monastery outside Yangon. They’d been marching for over a month now, starting some 300 miles away in Mandalay. Other students’ groups had also marched on the old capital. Shades of history. Friends and heroes identified by the year of their protest. At the end of January the Internet had seemed unusually slow, even for Myanmar. What’s up with the Internet? I asked an online activist friend. It’s the government’s response, she said. They don’t want news of the marches to spread. Then the connection to Facebook went down for a few hours, shades https://www.newmandala.org/discipline-and-duty/ 1/3