For your enjoyment ...

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrator James Braithwaite have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short.



(Hat tip to TR for sending this my way. I love it!)

Unspeakable Crimes Against Iraq

This week in Time Magazine there is an article entitled Iraq's Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters.

While sexual violence has accompanied warfare for millennia and insecurity always provides opportunities for criminal elements to profit, what is happening in Iraq today reveals how far a once progressive country (relative to its neighbors) has regressed on the issue of women's rights and how ferociously the seams of a traditional Arab society that values female virginity have been ripped apart. Last month Baghdad's minister of women's affairs, Dr. Nawal al-Samarraie, resigned in protest at the lack of resources provided to her office by the government. "The ministry is just an empty post," she told TIME. "Why do I come to the office every day if I don't have any resources?" Yet even Samarraie didn't think sex trafficking was an issue. "It's limited," she says, adding that she believed the girls involved chose to engage in prostitution. (Read it and weep.)

Umm, can we talk about why this "once progressive country" is now home to these "unspeakable crimes"? It did not just happen. The war and chaos and ripping apart of the seams of society did not just happen. Never never forget that this is the result of the criminal war consciously perpetrated by the handful of people who pimped it, who all should be tried for war crimes in the ICC. Oh yeah, I forgot -- the freedom loving U.S. is one of the countries that has refused to sign on to the ICC.

Let's not forget also that Iraq was a once progressive country under Saddam Hussein. I'm not defending the guy, but the fact is when the "coalition of the willing" shocked and awed Iraq, irreparable damage was done. These are the implications of war. War is always unwinnable, immoral, and stupid. And this one, predicated on lies, is just heinous.

Finally, let's not let President Obama forget that he was elected with a mandate to end the shameful war on Iraq. To watch him flex his muscles in Afghanistan and Pakistan is horrifying. He's rumored to be smart and well-read. Has he not read his history of that area?

Note: This amazing photograph was taken by the lovely and talented Mr. Ether.

Obsessing

I am obsessing just a little on the Bill Ayers/ Weather Underground story. It is being discussed a lot since Bill Ayers has broken his silence after the election. It makes me want to read his memoir Fugitive Days and see the Weather Underground documentary.

One reason that it interests me so much, is that this is my childhood history. Madison, Wisconsin -- where I grew up and still live -- was one of the "hotbeds" of anti-war activism, along with Berkley, et al. I lived about a mile off of the university campus and during riots, vestiges of teargas clouds would waft through our neighborhood. My parents, who were a doctor and a nurse, would go down to help patch students up after a meleé.

One of the decisive events that turned the anti-war movement around actually occurred here in 1970: 4 young men who identified with the Weather Underground, detonated a car bomb outside of a university building that housed the controversial Army Math Research Center. Like the WU, they wanted to destroy only the property and thought that by doing it in the middle of the night there would be no people present. Unfortunately, there was a graduate student working in his lab, Robert Fassnacht, a man with a wife and young children, who died in the blast.

Of the 4 men, 3 of them were eventually apprehended and served time in prison. One of them, Leo Burt, has never been caught. He is still on the FBI's "most wanted" list. The oldest of the 4, Karl Armstrong, was identified as the "ringleader." At the time he was arrested, he professed to be largely unrepentant for his act and cited the context of the war on Viet Nam. As you might imagine, this did not sit well with many people, even those sympathetic to the cause. (I have friends who are friends with Fassnacht's widow, and I understand that she has not been able to forgive Armstrong and the others. Karl Armstrong has expressed remorse as time has passed.)

Daily Kos has a post up today discussing Ayers and the tactics of the WU. He also is adamant about looking at the context. While I consider myself to be a pacifist and absolutely do not condone any violence as a means to an end, I understand what he is saying. Karl Armstrong says that he became a revolutionary when his head hit the ground while being beaten by Chicago cops outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968. (My nephew said something similar when, at the age of 17, he was arrested at the WTO/IMF protests in Washington, DC. While he was in custody, a federal marshal told him that he would "mess him up so bad, his mom wouldn't recognize him." Nice.)

In the late sixties there were groups of people in the US who felt that war was being waged against them, and evidence shows that it was not far from the truth. And then consider that many of these people were in their late teens or early twenties ... it's the whole frontal lobe development thing!

I am nearly 50 and a practicing Quaker; as I said before, I do not condone what was done. But I certainly understand it in its context. (Believe it or not, I understand what Timothy McVeigh did, in its context. In fact, I have to condemn violence in all forms, because the actions of a Timothy McVeigh seem to be the logical conclusion of the "destroy property, not people" actions of a group like the Weather Underground.)

One of my all time favorite documentary films is The War At Home. It is about the anti-Viet Nam war movement as it unfolded in my hometown (though it easily could have been made in any number of places.) If any of this interests you, I'm sure that the film is available through Netflix.

Oy, too much thinking for a Sunday morning when I really need to be doing some laundry.

Peace, friends.

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

Human Smoke explores the roots of war through the lens of World War II. Using newspaper articles, diaries, letters, memoirs, and official documents, the author, Nicholson Baker, assembled hundreds of discrete vignettes into a compelling narrative that should dispel numerous myths about the early days of the "Good War." The evil of the Third Reich hardly needs more exposure, but this book offers further insight into the warped and perverse ideals that drove Hitler and his followers.

What surprised me in this book was the depth of the racism that motivated Winston Churchill. If you took speeches that Churchill made, and substituted the word "Jew" for "Hun" you might be hard-pressed to know that you weren't listening to Hitler. It was the British that began the indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population of Germany, for which "the Blitz" was retaliation.

And lest you think the European arm of the war was about freeing the Jews, guess again. Churchill's 1941 blockade of food, medicine, and clothing to the German-occupied countries caused the death of thousands and thousands of civilians, many of them Jewish refugees that had been expelled from their homes. Not to mention the Jewish refugees that were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps in England, because they were Germans too and might hold German sympathies.

Then there were the refugees that actually made it onto ships and escaped the carnage in Europe. The United States and countries of the British Commonwealth [i.e. Empire] enforced strict quotas as to how many refugees would be accepted every year. There were many instances of ships carrying refugees turned away from port after port. In some documented cases the ships were actually shelled at sea, killing most of their passengers.

(I remember my mother once telling me that the blame for the war between Israel and Palestine lay with Britain and the United States, for turning their backs on Jewish refugees. I had no idea of the magnitude.)

While Churchill is lusting for the blood of Huns, FDR is actively fomenting the Sino-Japanese War while tightening the noose around Japan, hoping to provoke them into an attack on the U.S. The attack on Pearl Harbor, when it came, was not a surprise. It was fully expected and the date that it occurred was anticipated, so essentially the 2000+ people that died in the attack were used as bait.

Baker also shows the profiteers: the arms manufacturers, the scientists and academics who saw war as a cash cow for their research, the opportunists (like Wisconsin native son, Frank Lloyd Wright, who thought the total destruction of those old European cities was a good thing, so that new cities could be built following a new plan -- his. What a weenie.)

The other thread of the story that Baker tells -- one that has not been told enough -- is that of the pacifists who actively resisted the war by working for diplomatic solutions, by defying Churchill's blockade to feed the starving population of Europe, by going to jail rather than fighting. Gandhi figures prominently, as do Clarence Pickett, Herbert Hoover, and Rufus Jones of the Religious Society of Friends. He mentions the Socialist Party and its leader Norman Thomas, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the War Resisters' League. Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin is lauded for casting the lone dissenting vote against joining the war. Many other individuals are mentioned as well, people in many countries.

Baker does not draw any parallels between his narrative and current events as we are experiencing them, but the parallels are clear. Just as the seeds of World War II were sown in World War I, we see the seeds of the Viet Nam War being sown during World War II. Violence begets violence, that is the message of this book.

Invariably when one is a pacifist, someone will say, "Yeah, but what about World War II?" Baker did impeccable research and presents reams of evidence that World War II was not inevitable, that like all wars it was motivated by a lust for power and profit, predicated on propaganda and lies.

Baker dedicates Human Smoke to "the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British Pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."

I highly recommend Human Smoke. It is not a pretty book, many parts are painful to read, while others will infuriate. It is, however, in a format that is quite easy to read and I think you will find it absolutely compelling.

Dennis is still my man.

This arrived in my email inbox this evening, reminding me who the real peace candidate always was and still is. I don't have cable teevee, or I would be watching it.

When Will We Ever Learn?

Quaker Dave, the Quaker Agitator, wrote an excellent post this week about why progressives should not advocate for reinstatement of military conscription, and why instead, we should all be out there actively opposing the next war (and the next and the next ...) I hope you will go and read it.

War is not only immoral and ineffective, it is stupid. Its main function is to line the pockets of profiteers. We don't need to become apologists for any war. Better to keep all young people safe.

Minding the Gap

Note: This post contains references to God and expressions of faith. I consider myself to be agnostic. While I am certain of the existence of something that resides in and beyond myself, that connects me with all of this world, because of my upbringing I am not comfortable referring to it as "God." Sometimes I refer to "spirit" or to the term used by a dear old Friend, Francis Hole: "Divine Companion." Sometimes I just sort of mumble something incoherently or borrow a god from Terry Pratchett.

I was not brought up a Friend, and in fact worship and prayer were never a part of my life experience until I began attending Quaker Meeting 16 years ago. I love Meeting for Worship, but I confess that sometimes I have a hard time centering down and calming my monkey mind. Therefore I will often bring a book of devotional readings with me to Meeting, which I know irritates some Friends no end, but there you have it. At least I don't knit! Or snore ...

Last Sunday I had one of my current favorite books with me, Catherine Whitmire's Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk Through the Quaker Tradition. I find myself turning to this book quite often for guidance in navigating these troubled and disheartening times, when a world without war seems very far away. Whitmire talks about how, as Friends we are challenged to stand in the gap between the way things are and the way they could be. The writer/educator Parker Palmer puts it this way:

There is no easy solution. There never has been and there never will be. But we must learn to stand in this gap, faithfully holding the tension and negotiating between what is and what is possible. (p. 30)

Whitmire adds, "Through prayer and discernment we, too, can know in which gaps God would have us stand. Our efforts may feel unimportant, but nothing is too small to make a difference ... It is important that we climb God's holy hill and stand in the social, political, and spiritual gaps of our time, not only because God calls us, but because there is no one else to go." [my italics]

I find myself yearning for a leader, another Gandhi or King, who will make big waves and bring about another social and political revolution. I am discouraged when no one appears. The fact is, we have to be the ones to carry that torch. Each of us has the capacity to plant those seeds, to bring about change. We have to, because there is no one else to do it.

Thomas R. Kelly said,

No giant figure of historic size will stalk across the stage of history today, as a new Messiah. But in simple, humble, imperfect people like you and me wells up the spring of hope. We have this treasure of the seed in earthen vessels -- very earthen vessels. You and I know how imperfect we are. Yet those little demonstrations of love and goodwill ... deeds done in the midst of suffering ... stir hope that humanity as a whole will be aroused to yield to the press and surge of the Eternal Love within them ... (p. 31)

How am I minding the gap, and working for a peaceful and just world?

(The photo above was taken in London last month by my friend Vicki, who minds the gap by working to get military recruiters out of our local schools. Used by permission.)

4,000

4,000 American troops killed in action
1,191,216 Iraqi deaths due to the U.S. invasion

It is 5 years past time to end this travesty. We must demand it of our political candidates.

We must continue to demand that our representatives in Congress hold accountable the criminals responsible for this war. No more, "So?"

Stop. the. war.

(Mosaic created by Nico Pitney.)

In Memorium

Today marks the 5 year anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death in Rafah, Palestine. Rachel Corrie, a 23 year old college student from Washington state, died while being a human shield, to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home in Gaza. She was run over by a (U.S. supplied) bulldozer, used by the Israeli military as a weapon of war. The driver of the bulldozer claimed that he did not see her. Multiple witnesses said that Rachel was in plain view, standing atop a mound of dirt wearing a blaze orange vest, at eye level with the driver. A partial investigation by the Israeli government found Rachel to be at fault; a full investigation of her death was never conducted. Rachel Corrie is considered a martyr in Palestine.

On Friday night I went to see My Name Is Rachel Corrie, the play that was adapted from Rachel's writing. I had read the text of the play before, but hearing the words being spoken was a treat. Rachel Corrie was a gifted writer, often very funny. Her emails to her parents from Gaza, the last one just a day or two before she died, were achingly poignant.

The play lasted about 90 minutes, an enormous undertaking for the lone actress who played Rachel. Everyone involved with this production chose to remain anonymous, in order to keep the audience wholly focused on Rachel's message.

Incidentally, the play has been translated into Arabic and will be playing in numerous locations throughout Israel and Palestine this month. Rachel's parents traveled to Palestine for the premiere.

I am so glad that I was finally able to see it. I highly recommend reading it, and seeing it if it is produced in your area.

One Day = 720 Million Dollars

The Prophet Reconsidered

The Martin Luther King holiday. As a teacher, I struggle with it every year. How do I teach about this man in a way that doesn't reduce who he was to being a statue, frozen in time? How do I teach about what he gave his life for, without boiling it down to meaningless words like "freedom" or the obligatory writing "I have a dream that ..."? How do I (to crib a phrase from Teaching Tolerance, a publication you should know about if you don't) put the movement back into teaching about the Civil Rights Movement? And make it appropriate for kindergartners?

Today the War Times sent me a link to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Prophet Reconsidered, by Christopher Phelps. This is exactly what I've been seeking, a clear eyed look at the activist King was becoming at the time of his death.

We forget so much. We forget that he was hanging by a thread in 1968 at the time of his death, whose 40th anniversary we will mark in April. We forget that his moral authority had frayed, leaving his fund raising in free fall. We forget that in his final years, he faced not only a rising "white backlash" — the media term for white obduracy in the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods, North as well as South — but resentment from establishment liberals who thought he had executed too radical a turn by opposing a Democratic president and the Vietnam War. We forget that although blacks still looked to him more than any other leader, he was increasingly viewed with cynicism by young militants who derided him as "De Lawd" and thought his nonviolence too tepid for the times. We forget that police agencies from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to military intelligence viewed him as a dangerous subversive, listened in on his conversations, and spread both true and false rumors about him in a concerted campaign to discredit him. We forget that between major addresses he was prone to depression, afflicted by insomnia so severe that he slept only a few hours each night, even when popping sleeping pills. We forget that his close associates were concerned by his anxiety and fatigue, and taken aback by his fixation on his own mortality. We forget the critics who accused him of harboring a "Messiah complex."

By all rights, though, we ought to remember. We are surrounded by constant reminders of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Statues, monuments, and postage stamps bear his likeness, highways and boulevards his name. He has become a national icon. Television ads sample his voice. Presidential candidates invoke the "fierce urgency of now." Ubiquity has come, however, at a price. The nonviolent revolutionary who upended conventional society and sought to induce tension has become an anodyne symbol of progress. The disappointed prophet who spoke toward the end of his life of America as a nightmare is remembered only for his 1963 dream. Once widely reviled, King has become an almost obligatory object of reverence. Even conservatives genuflect before his memory. While dismantling affirmative action, a policy King advocated, they cite King's aspiration that Americans be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. King is a totem: safe, universal, unobjectionable. He is as remote and mythical to schoolchildren as any other figure in the national pantheon stretching back to the founding fathers. His inner turmoil, his public failures, his vocal critics, left and right, have all faded from view, replaced by a fable in which a nation awakens gently to his self-evident dream.

This pattern is not wholly lamentable. It may even be necessary. Had the long campaign waged by Coretta Scott King after his murder not succeeded, had she and her husband's closest associates not surmounted strong resistance and achieved a national day named for him, there might be no annual federal commemoration of the life of any African-American. There might be no occasion for the nation to reflect upon the merit of the dismantling of overt racism in law, public accommodations, and education, as well as the securing of voting rights for all citizens, regardless of race. These accomplishments — understood by King himself as gigantic steps forward — merit our commemoration.

But the ceremonial gloss now overlaid upon Martin Luther King Jr. causes problems. By rendering him immaculate and incontrovertible, sanctification has, paradoxically, left him vulnerable. Cynicism is too easily the reaction when revelations occur about, say, King's sexual escapades or collegiate plagiarism. But King's heroism and place in history never depended on a halo of saintly purity. Brilliant, flawed, controversial, talented, King — as he was first to observe — was always a sinner.

I am inspired to seek out the books Phelps cites in his essay. And I remind myself, that it is not as important how I celebrate this one day with my students, but what I model for them each and every day.

Happy Hogamany!

2008 is upon us. I hope you all celebrated, and celebrated safely. Mr. Ether and I went to the home of dear long-time friends. It was weird to remember New Year's parties of years past with some of these same people, when we all had little kids. Last night we were the only couple there with a school-age child, and she's quickly rocketing through her childhood years. She didn't want to come to the party with us and be the only kid!

Highlights of last night: incredibly delicious food, including a seemingly bottomless pot of gumbo made by our hosts; playing "speed Scrabble" for the first time; meeting a gentleman who had been in the very first wave of Peace Corps volunteers; sharing our New Year's tradition, "snapdragons": you spread a layer of raisins in a pan, pour warmed brandy over them, and light them on fire. Then you try to grab a flaming raisin and pop it into your mouth before it goes out. If you are successful, you'll have good luck in the coming year. (And only a smidgeon of a burn on your tongue, really. Try it. It's fun.)

I am not one for making fancy schmancy resolutions. I do have some wishes for the coming year:

*I dearly wish to see George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales tried and convicted for war crimes.
*I wish for a presidential election that is not rigged.
*I wish for the nonsensical and dangerous debate about whether climate change is real to stop, and a concerted effort made in the upper echelons of power, as well as the level of individuals like us, to mitigate and even reverse the harm that continues to be done.
*I wish for economic justice for the lower income residents of New Orleans.
*I wish for WalMart to go out of business, to be replaced with sustainable employment for all.
*I wish to see the number of unionized workers start to increase in this country.
* I wish to see legal and economic justice, and an end to profiling, for immigrants in this country.
*I wish to see a complete repeal of the NCLB (No Child Left Behind) bill.
* I wish to see not one more luxury condo project approved in my city, that all development be required to be affordable housing and practical for families.
*I wish for Mr. Ether to find work that he enjoys and that will keep our family afloat.
*I wish for a nice fat scholarship for me, so I can quit worrying about how I'm going to pay for each and every graduate course I take.
*I wish to finish my library student teaching, become certified to be a school library media specialist, and get the library position at my current school.
* I wish for my loved ones -- family and friends -- to be healthy, and to live with intention and joy.
*I wish to get it together to have just one music night at our house, and just one knitting party.
*I wish to get my bathroom ceiling repaired and painted.
*I wish that Martha Stewart would quit stealing my ideas, darn it!
*This almost goes without saying, except that it needs to be said and said often: I wish for the troops to be pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. I wish for a world without war, where violence is never considered, either as a first or a last resort. War is over, if we want it.

Best wishes for 2008!

Dias de los Muertos and a wish for peace

Display and photo by Friend, Lester Doré. He says, "Day of the Dead altar at Casa Doré-Hanner. The red poster lists the names of all confirmed US military deaths from the beginning of the Iraq War to September 4 2007; the black poster has on it thumbnail-size photos of all confirmed military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan since the last Day of the Dead. That's pan de muerto on the plate."

I find this very moving.

Lester is an artist who creates posters that celebrate peace, peacemakers, and those who speak truth to power. You can see the full array here.

Pink: Dear Mr. President

Thanks to Sminthia for sending this amazing song to me. As she pointed out, there was an almost identical version (minus the images) with a "parental discretion for explicit language" tag. There IS no explicit language in the song. I guess it must mean it's dangerous to question the so-called "commander in chief."

I love these guys!

Just Say No To Military Recruiters In High Schools

This article appeared in our local evening paper on September 21. TAME, a counter-recruitment organization, is active in all of our city high schools. One of the things they do is inform parents of the need to "opt out" of having their children's records handed over to the military for recruitment purposes (one of the lovely provisions of No Child Left Behind.) And their efforts are paying off:

This year, 2,232 of about 8,000 Madison high school students withheld their names from military recruiters. [That's more than 1/4, for you mathematically challenged readers.] Four years ago, less than 500 students opted out.

What's happening on the counter-recruitment scene in your community?

Bring Them Home, Pete Seeger

This afternoon I went to see the documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song. Pete Seeger has long been a hero of mine. He is a folk music icon, but how many people know what he sacrificed when he stood up to Joseph McCarthy and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in the fifties? For seventeen years, Pete was banned from the airwaves in the U.S., both radio and television, because he told HUAC that his politics were none of their business. Seventeen years. Yet he is a man who harbors no bitterness towards his persecutors, but speaks only of love, peace, and understanding.

During the years when Pete was blacklisted, he made his living doing school programs. I was extremely moved by the footage of him singing with children. He preaches a gospel, if you will, of community singing. This is something I have been doing with my students for a few years now, and it is very near and dear to my heart. Listening to Pete talk about it was a huge affirmation of my work.

I wept through a good half of the film. I wept with nostalgia, I wept in celebration of this life writ large, and I wept for the state of our country now.

If there was one thing wrong with the film, it is that it plays things a little too safe. There are allusions to what is happening today, but nobody overtly connects any dots. Natalie Mains is featured talking about Pete's blacklisting, but she makes nary a peep about her own. Bruce Springsteen warns that fascism could come again, not acknowledging that it is HERE and NOW. Pete's environmental work on the Hudson River is highlighted, but nothing about the environmental disasters we are facing as the world warms up. Footage of Vietnam, but no mention of Iraq. I found that disappointing and frustrating.

It was also disquieting when many of the people talked about him in the past tense, as if he was already dead. He is still very much alive.

But critiques aside, this is a film that is well worth seeing if you get the chance.

And I'll end by telling you what I tell my students: Sing. Don't ever let anyone tell you that you can't or shouldn't. There is power in singing, and that power belongs to all of us, not just the Pete Seegers of the world. (And Pete would be the first person to tell you that.) So often these days, we surrender the music to someone else, to the professionals, and we go around plugged in to our iPods or Walkmen. I tell my students that music is participatory, not a consumer product, and that their voices are an instrument that they always have with them wherever they are. I also tell them that that is the most important lesson they'll learn from me, more important than reading, writing or math. (Take that NCLB!)

Peace.

Abundance

Poodle Doc and I have both been reading Barbara Kingsolver's new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In fact, he bought it for me for my birthday. We keep comparing notes, and we're both a little obsessed with this idea of eating locally. So last Sunday after Meeting, when I casually mentioned that I really wanted to can tomatoes, he immediately offered up his share of tomatoes from the community garden of which he is a member.

After work today, Poodle Doc, Mr. Ether, and I drove out to his garden about half an hour out of town. We braved the mosquitoes -- oh my God, they were fierce, but my Repel Lemon Eucalyptus goop seemed to really work. (I was a little concerned that any marauding koalas might catch wind of us, and then we'd really be sorry, but they must have all been sleeping.) We harvested 5 bushels of tomatoes, plus a variety of both sweet and hot peppers, leeks, basil, eggplants, and a couple of tardy watermelons and cukes. Poodle Doc also generously gave us a portion of his onions and garlic for the year. It is truly an astounding amount of food.

Now comes the part that is both wonderful and difficult -- figuring out how to deal with it all. Making the time to make up a big batch of baba ganouj, roasting the peppers, making salsa ...

Yesterday Quaker Dave asked what each of us will do to end the current wars and prevent the next one. My answer was, "Can tomatoes." What I meant is, we need to do the protesting and the activism, but we also need to remember to find joy, to build our communities, to hold a vision of what we want the world to be and to work toward that. That's what I am doing as I celebrate this amazing abundance.

One more song for today ...

Greg Brown sings his song, "I Want My Country Back", Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, 2003.

You know how you want something so badly sometimes, that your desire is visceral? No, I'm not talking about Greg Brown. I'm talking about wanting to wake up from this 6 1/2 year nightmare. Wanting the Bush administration's reign of terror to come to an end and being able to focus on the things that matter like climate change, education, poverty ... not this insane (and highly profitable) game of chicken with Iran, with North Korea, with Osama Bin Laden, with our's and our children's lives and future as pawns.

I want my country back!

Road of Good Intentions, John Gorka

I posted this some time ago, but it bears another look, especially on this most sober of anniversaries.

And please, let's not forget that this is also the anniversary of the bloody 1974 CIA led overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chilé.

We can't afford another war.