And the Bad Mother Gets A Nobel Prize!

For 13 of the last 19 years, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi has lived under house arrest for promoting democracy in the former Burma.

I’m sure it’s just a bizarre coincidence that her protest began as her two sons entered pre-adolescence.

Ms. Kyi was given the option of leaving the country and taking her husband and sons with her but instead she sent her family to England and she heroically remained behind in the home, under house arrest in a lovely neighborhood—leaving her husband to raise her sons alone. For this she received a Nobel Peace Prize.

Sign me up.

To many women she is a heroine—or they would be if they knew about her. The problem with her choice to stay under house arrest (and she has been given the option of leaving) is that it’s kind of a “Stella Dallas” move, designed to elicit sympathy for a heroine who’s just going to die in the end. It doesn’t really accomplish anything. She’s in her own home, which is apparently built on a small lake (across which an American man just swam to try and see her). There she writes and spends her time in quiet contemplation. She’s been given the opportunity to leave (and not come back) but refused, even when her husband was dying of cancer. It’s hard to work up the sympathy. I actually have more sympathy for her husband who was left with the task of raising two teenage sons on his own. I feel his pain—trust me, Suu Kyi got the better deal.

Ms. Kyi’s father helped lead the fight for independence from the Brits and was later assassinated for it in 1947. In 1960, when she was 15, Suu Kyi left Burma and did not return until 1988. At that point she decided to run for office and was placed under house arrest by the dictatorship a year later.

She’s still there and there’s still no democracy in Burma.

It’s sad because she is reportedly in poor health as she enters this latest trial. Her husband is now dead. Her sons are now in their 30’s. I do not sanction violence and war—I’m the mother of two sons old enough to be drafted. But I do support change by the ballot box. The ballot box just got women elected in Kuwait this week, the ballot box finally got rid of George Bush. Sometimes the ballot pops out someone who is unbearably bad but—in this country at least—all you have to do is wait another four years and you get another chance.

Four years—even eight years—is a much shorter and more effective period of time than the almost two decades Suu Kyi has spent in Burma, next to her lake. Her life seems a terrible waste to me. There are many ways to effect change but hiding out is not one of them. Because if you can’t get out of your house, you cannot vote.

Myanmar Presses Case Against Pro-Democracy Leader – NYTimes.com.