Still I Rise

Episode #472: “Where is my grandmother’s vote?!” asks Thiri. Her core argument is that Myanmar’s struggle today is not a failed revolution, but the evolution of a long, cyclical people’s movement, whose legitimacy most recently derives from a valid election overturned by the military, and from the accumulated sacrifice and sustained moral agency of ordinary people. For Thiri, the most powerful form of resistance now is preserving dignity, voice, and mutual care amid prolonged uncertainty.

She grounds this argument in lived experience. Her grandmother, eighty-two at the time, insisted on voting in person in the November 2020 general election despite being eligible for early voting at home. On election day morning, she woke before dawn and went to the polling station to cast her ballot for the National League for Democracy; a week later, she died. She never witnessed the coup that overturned the election results, sparing her the pain of seeing what she regarded as a sacred civic duty rendered meaningless. For Thiri, the legitimacy crisis begins there: millions of votes, like her grandmother’s, were cast in good faith but never honored.

From this starting point, Thiri argues that any new election organized by the same military lacks moral and political legitimacy. She describes it as an attempt to erase their unresolved theft. Democracy, she insists, cannot be reset without reckoning with the original violation. The election matters deeply to the military and to some international actors seeking closure, but not to people living with airstrikes, displacement, and fear. To the junta, it functions as an exit strategy that just sustains their oppressive rule in the guise civilian governance.

To put the despair surrounding these times in Myanmar in context, Thiri turns to movement theory. She describes movements as cyclical, marked by peaks of hope followed by repression and exhaustion. The downturn now, she emphasizes, is but a natural phase, and to not get overly caught up in it.

Thiri believes the present moment calls for reflection, role clarity, and recognition of small victories that preserve people power. Survival itself becomes a form of resistance. She frames emotional self-preservation as defiance, concluding, “I would rather choose to remember the kindness and the community and the resilience of people that are against any form of oppression.”