Ethics Newsline®

Late Saturday, as news trickled in about street protests in Myanmar, we were picking blueberries on a Maine mountainside when the phone rang.

That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. When I was growing up, berry picking meant scrambling to the tops of rocky cuts where they’d blasted the highway through the forest. It meant following no particular path, but going where the intuition took you, always searching the ankle-high bushes for the brightest and largest clusters. It meant a commitment — usually several hours — ending only when the empty Jack and Jill Peanut Butter pails were brim-full.

But mostly, it meant setting other things aside, including the rest of the world. While the word multitasking hadn’t yet been coined, it was clear already that if you thought success meant doing several things at once, blueberrying wasn’t your thing.

As the late afternoon sun raked the distant hills on Saturday, it highlighted a cell-phone tower that may have been enabling the ringing. The member of our group who answered was planning a fundraising event several thousand miles away in the Caribbean. Wandering a few feet off, she talked for five minutes with the artist designing her invitation on deadline. Then she came back to berry picking.

The nice thing about blueberrying is that it takes some concentration, but not much. It sets you loose to intersect with others and then drift apart, without need of repeated hellos or goodbyes. You talk easily when you’re close by and unapologetically fall silent when you’re not.

In one of those silent periods, I found myself thinking about that ringing phone. There were phones ringing in Myanmar, too, where a ghastly and tyrannical government once again had cracked down intensely on its opponents. This time, soldiers had fired into a parade of monks and their supporters. Several were dead, and many more had been wounded.

But this week something was different. Foreign journalists had largely been purged from the country, yet the news was still getting out. Armed with cell phones, video cameras, Internet blogs, and a passion for truth-telling, the public had transformed itself into a pack of amateur journalists. Never mind that the world’s major news outlets couldn’t get in. Never mind that the government imposed draconian censorship on local reporting. News was flowing like water down a mountainside.

And it wasn’t just washing away. As the country’s clique of aging despots has folded in more tightly upon itself in recent years, exiles have built news networks outside the country. Working daily with news from sources operating within Myanmar (formerly Burma), they’ve learned to sift fact from rumor, weigh the essential against the merely interesting, and keep their supporters informed. So when the protests broke open this past week, there were well-practiced traditions of editorial judgment. There were audiences around the world eager for the news. And there were obvious destinations for dispatches from citizen journalists.

One such destination, the Democratic Voice of Burma, operates radio and TV stations from its base in Norway. “Our station is a key factor in making a change,” Khin Maung Win told Reuters last week. In 1988, a military crackdown against a massive protest killed some 3,000 people. At the time, “Burma was a completely closed country,” he said, and “there was no media coverage.” Now, he said, “everyone is watching.”

From the perspective of a pristine Maine mountainside, it’s easy to criticize cell-phone towers for spoiling the view. There’s a good deal of local protest about plans to build another nearby. But those protests, however they end, won’t descend into bloodshed. That’s how freedom works. Not only does it let technology change the way you do business, making possible new interminglings of work and leisure that were impossible when I first went blueberrying, it also lets you preserve the kind of liberties Maine has and Myanmar wants.

And that’s the point. What tyrants for centuries have accomplished by brute force — walling off their enemies behind barriers of invisibility, killing and maiming without publicity, viciously eliminating all reporting except what they sanction, luxuriating in a secrecy that lets them merge the grim work of oppression with their leisurely appropriation of power — is suddenly being upended. The agent of change is not tanks and troops. It’s the flitting of tiny electronic impulses around the world.

Yes, there’s a moral downside to the advance of cell phones. Towers litter the landscape. Kids forget how to be solitary. Students message their friends during exams to get the answers. Drivers making calls swerve off the highway. Terrorists wire phones to bombs. But there’s a moral upside as well. Transparency overcomes obfuscation. Truth-telling slices through censorship. People do more in less time, with greater teamwork and less wasted effort. And from Maine and Myanmar, in ways no dictatorship can squelch, freedom literally rings.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics