seemed timely for me to pick up and turn to this page

In Plum Village in France, we receive many letters from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It is very painful to read them, but we have to do it , we have to be in contact. We try our best to help, but the suffering is enormous, and sometimes we are discouraged. It is said that half the boat people die in the ocean; only half arrive at the shores in Southeast Asia.

There are many young girls, boat people, who are raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries try to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continue to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who war raped by a Thai pirate. She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.

When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we cannot do that. In my meditation I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I am now the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become the pirate I cannot condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians and others do not do something about the situations, in 25 years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in 25 years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

-Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

---
the passage above speaks to another time, in the mid-eighties, and the Thai village would necessarily be different from those in Somalia today, and it is not girls on boats being raped but hostages made out of sailors of international corporations, oil companies, and so on. but when looking at this money-maker story of the entertainment press (CNN, FOX, MSNBC), one in a more thoughtful world could speak of the conditions in Somalia without being scoffed at. the poverty, lawlessness, and violence there competes with Sudan, although forgotten by the press and university student aide groups. the fishing trade has been pirated by unlicensed international fishermen (the UN reports 300 million dollars worth of fish each year), and the corporate shipping industry has destroyed the ecosystem with toxic dumping. none of this justifies violence or hostages, but certainly the answer is not to invade Somalia, as wack-job John Bolton suggested last week. cooler heads certainly will prevail, but probably not to the extent of looking at Somali pirates as a cultural phenomenon, in a context, a product of their situation, one deserving much more than a military solution that "shoots us all."