Gulag Fondu

The surest way for me to conjure up something remarkably photographic is to decide to leave my camera at home. But really, how could I have predicted that we would encounter members of the CCP butchering compassionate truthful idealists for the purpose of selling their internal organs on the back of a flatbed truck rolling down Haymarket Street followed by a troupe of skip-stepping percussionists dressed in red and yellow silk.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

I am no fan of communist China and their dismal human rights record, so I was instantly sympathetic to the plight of the protestors, assuming that they were some ethnic minority getting squeezed by the government. I was mildly less supportive when a volunteer working the end of the parade thrust a brochure in my hand and explained that the Falun Gong (aka Falun Dafa), were in fact a new religion based on the teachings of the Buddha introduced into China in 1992 to the brutal reception of the current regime.

“Why would the government target the Falun Gong for organ harvesting? Wouldn't they just kill anyone for that?”

“Maybe because they are Buddhists and their organs carry their good karma and outlaw spirituality into the high ranking party officials who receive them?”

Mind you, I am, just as skeptical of new religions as I am of the classics, but I most certainly do not support religious intolerance. But how American…how Western of me…that it never occurred to me that a cult could center around the Buddha…well according to the government anyway.

Mighty convenient, that word, when you need to get rid of a nuisance…cult.