[Falun Dafa] Sharon Kilarski – America’s Liberty vs. CCP’s Transnational Repression

On the 4th of July, when I saw the fireworks in the sky going home at night, I thought, ah, this is for me. Whoa, this is so cool. I'm Sharon Kalarski. I live in the Chicagoland area. I just wanted to talk about some things that I've been thinking about recently. So, as we're coming up on the 250th anniversary of our country and the Declaration of Independence, I was thinking back to when I started practicing Falun Gong, because I started in early July, like the first or second of that month, and on the 4th of July, when I saw the fireworks in the sky going home at night, I thought, ah, this is for me. Whoa, this is so cool, because I found something that I thought was going to make me a better person. It was going to give me a little more direction in my life. And I was already 40 by that point. So, that's kind of my touchstone to America. Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, is an ancient spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition. Falun Gong combines meditation and gentle exercises, similar to yoga or tai chi, with a moral philosophy centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, or in Chinese, Zhenshan Ren. Falun Gong practitioners aspire to live by these principles in their daily lives. In traditional Chinese culture, the process of perfecting and refining the mind and body is called cultivation. Our modern language uses the word Qigong to describe this. What differentiates Falun Gong from other forms of Qigong is its emphasis on morality, character, and the cultivation of virtue. As I practiced, because it's now been like 26 years, it's not beginning a practice. People begin things and they let them go, but it's like, why do you keep practicing? Why are you practicing for 26 years? Are you nuts? No. It's because there's benefits. Being 40, I was in graduate school, and had finished a few years before, and was working on my dissertation, trying to also, at the same time, have a baby. Kind of late to be starting to have a family. So, we'd been trying on and off for a while, but then three years we were trying pretty seriously, nothing, until I started practicing. So, in July to October, in October I was pregnant, which means probably, you don't notice for a while, so probably it was pretty soon after I started practicing. To me, that was a miracle. So, that was number one. I'm pregnant. And then, it's just trying to live with all of the things that come into your life that aren't maybe pleasant. For example, my husband did not enjoy me practicing. He was very angry a lot. He was very disappointed. And it wasn't just about practicing, it was just in general. But until I started looking at how I was contributing to that, was I being selfish? Was I being sarcastic, which I can be? Was I just not listening to him, and what was important to him? So, through the years, from going to not supporting me, to kind of rolling his eyes if I mentioned Falun Gong in someone else's presence, to calling us Falunis, he recently, after the transnational repression started, he took a picture with me. Now, he's a very private person, so taking a picture with me to put on a public media site is pretty amazing anyway, but with a sign that says, I stand by Falun Gong. And I was just so touched that he did that. I thought it was just, you know, what a change. So, it just made me very happy. When I first started, and the persecution had not begun, about a few weeks afterwards, it had begun in China. And the lady who taught me the practice asked me, Are you going to stop practicing? And I was like, Why? Why would I start practicing? What has that got to do with me? Nothing. For nearly 26 years, the CCP has persecuted tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners. This includes arbitrary detention, forced labor, systematic torture, forced organ harvesting, and documented cases of thousands of deaths in custody. Transnational repression is what the name says, that China is trying to persecute or eliminate Falun Gong around the whole world. Its main target is the U.S., because the U.S. is its main rival. And it's also where several companies of Falun Gong have started, have been planted here, and most successful. So, if you can conquer it here, you've got it beat for the rest of the world, right? Just get rid of it here, and you're good. So, they've done social media blasts and lawsuits against a couple of the companies that the practitioners have started in America. They have, well, the main thing that is bothersome to me is that the New York Times has written a series of articles that defame Falun Gong. And I think to myself that they're parroting what the CCP is saying, and I have to ask why? Why are you saying nasty and actual outright lies about people who are in China losing their jobs, having to leave their homes? Their relatives may be carted away at night. They may themselves end up in jail, be tortured. They may be killed for their organs. Why would an American company side with that kind of behavior? It makes absolutely no sense to me. I get what religious freedom means now. I didn't really get it before, because only when something could be taken away, at least in your imagination, do you grasp the enormity of what the change could bring. But I think that Americans will, if they know about it, if they know what we're going through, what Falun Gong, that it's trying to be eliminated, and that it is a right in America to believe what you want to believe, as long as you're not harming people. And truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance are not terms that have anything to do with hurting anyone else. On the contrary. So I think that Americans will support us and hold on to what this country was for. Although Congress has adopted multiple resolutions condemning these abuses, the Falun Gong Protection Act, S. 817, if enacted, will mark the first binding U.S. legislation to hold perpetrators accountable. This bill requires the president to impose visa and property blocking sanctions on foreign persons that have knowingly and directly engaged in or facilitated the involuntary harvesting of organs in China. Call your representatives. Unless they know about it, especially, well, in my state, especially in Illinois, this would be a great place to call. Call the senators and tell them that this is something that's important. It's not just for this one group that you may never have even heard of before. But if the Chinese actor can come, if the Chinese government has control and can wage lawsuits against American companies, if they can actually come and harass people in America, if they can sue people, the government of China has a lot of money. If they sue someone in America, how can we afford to go against that? But if Americans aren't aware of this, and if they don't make, if this law doesn't pass, you're allowing China to go forward. So call your representatives.