Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Taiwan is burning. It is a feeling felt on the streets surrounding the national legislature, occupied by students for more than a week now to oppose the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with China. It is an emotion that is gushed over the screams, the loud shedding of tears, and harsh words of the protest spokespeople who had chosen to stand the make-shift central stages in rotation. They speak without an end, keeping the voice of the movement continuously heard, and in the process tirelessly rallying the sit-in crowd, whose members, hailing from all corners of the island, gave up their studies, jobs, and families to hold their ground.

The first rays of light in the morning accompanies the receding darkness of the night.  When bright colors of nature once again scar off the uniform blackness that enveloped the land, it is time to start anew, completely anew.  The clear blue sky heads into the mind through the eyes, clearing out any mental debris that tired it from the night before.  Refreshing, reinvigorating...it re-balances the senses and reassures one that what is past is the past, and what is future starts now, ready to be written on a new, blank chapter.

For those people who are following Taiwanese politics at the moment, the past few days have been a bonanza.  An ambiguous announcement by the ruling Ma Ying-jeou administration that the ongoing ratification process for a second-stage free trade agreement with China will somehow bypass the normal legislative process has triggered a severe backlash from Taipei's student community.  In response to the legislature's meek non-response to executive intentions from the presidency, the students have surrounded, stormed, and occupied the legislature, starting a sit-in protest that is now entering its sixth day with no stop in sight.