But Kristof sure missed the mark at the very end of his piece. He says that settler attack Palestinians because they’re scared. He says that a number of settlers have been killed by Palestinians living in the area. Well, as far as I know, that number is two. Two. Let’s be honest, while settlers certainly use fear to marshal their supporters, they attack Palestinians because they want to drive them off of the land. That’s what their own statements indicate.
Nonetheless, I was glad to take look at what Kristof says and how he says it. There are a couple of arguments he makes that I think are worth using.
go watch the video, especially if you are an american or a brit. learn the truth of occupation. and while you are imagining it, imagine that’s you and your family instead of strangers living in those tents.
and again, go watch the video, imagine that being you and your loved ones in those tents, again, especially if you are an american.
maybe one of these videos will cause you to take action in the caribbean or occupied palestine, or your local animal shelter or food pantry. maybe one of these videos will get you to start reading more about your country’s part in the humanitarian disaster in both countries, or another country. maybe watching one of these videos will help you to count your blessings and to hold one that you love closer, or reach out to one that you love who needs it. i don’t care what watching one of these videos causes you to do, i just hope they cause you to do something besides just getting through your day as you usually do. if you are someone like me who is already doing something [i'm not doing a lot these days, but i do continue to educate myself, it's not a lot, but it's something]? i hope that these videos just encourage you to keep doing what you are doing.
or at least trying to be motivated to slog through qualitative data. *sigh* and then write. maybe it’s typical of a phd student to drink coffee in the morning and have a little (yes, little, a glass of juice with a shot of coconut rum that doesn’t always get fully drunk, drunk over the evening) drink at night when writing? *sigh* but at least my garden is still growing and the heat is finally here. right now it’s a nice cool 72 after hitting 94 today. i keep myself procrastinating all cooped up in my apartment with 2 fans and a swamp cooler going to stay cool.
—
here’s a little blogging:
i discovered this blog in the days after the haiti earthquake: the livesay [haiti] weblog. these people are christian missionaries who had built a life for themselves and their kids in haiti and are currently misplaced in texas, missing their haiti home. now, i get it – i’m this really really liberal christian and why do i read the weblog of christian missionaries? because i’m inspired by their dedication to and love for the people of haiti, and how human they are. and.. well, i just can’t seem to put to words why i read this site every day, but i like it and i like how they express their selfless faith in their love for the haitian people.
and this game: safe passage – it’s a flash game about what it’s like to be a gazan trying to get passage to the west bank. it centers around 3 real life stories: a gazan student who got accepted to beir zeit university (in the west bank) and her difficulties in actually getting to the west bank to study there; a family that got separated because the father couldn’t change the address on his id card from an address in gaza to an address in the west bank; and a merchant living in gaza who was unable to sell his goods in the west bank. right now the site is down, but the palestine monitor has a great article on it..
—
okay, that’s it. i should go back to procrastinating.
i’ve been reading the news as it comes out about the israeli attack on the gaza freedom flotilla. there are of course two sides to it. there’s the side of those who were attacked and then the side of those who did the attacking. i try to read with an open mind – the side of the attacker. i try to believe that the activists had weapons and were planning an attack from the moment they knew that the israeli defense force (IDF) was surrounding them. i try to believe in the innocence of the individual IDF members, even though what they were doing – trying to stop this flotilla in international waters – was clearly illegal. seeing both sides, in my opinion, is the pacifist thing to do. rather than attacking back, just listen and learn. this is their perspective on things, this is their narrative. i have my perspective, my narrative, and i want it listened to as well.
“A friend of mine was charged with “assault with a baby,” because when they demolished his house for the 3rd time, he handed his daughter to a soldier. He said, “I don’t have anyone where for her to sleep. You take her.” Another friend of mine was speaking at a completely nonviolent. He was beaten until his ribs were broken and then he was charged with assaulting a police officer. At his trial the police officer who testified admitted he wasn’t there and couldn’t even find the area where the demo took place on a map. My friend still went to jail.”
i am reminded of the american spin machine. the one that took us to occupation of iraq and afghanistan, and into so many places where we caused atrocities. it’s powerful and convincing. those spin machines are coming from legitimate governments versus the words of activists and their legitimate organizations but who don’t have the power of legitimacy of nationhood behind them. it’s easier for the general public, the masses, to be convinced by the governments, especially in the case of palestine, where for 60 years they have been painted as the attackers of the innocent and oppressed israelis. how can the state of israel be an attacker? look at the centuries of oppression, pogroms, and holocausts committed against the people who the country was created for. how can such an oppressed people ever become the oppressed?
i haven’t finished paulo freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” but i have gotten far enough to read where he talks about how rather than learning how not to oppress, those who have been oppressed learn how to oppress. it’s a powerful comment and drawing from my experience in the LGBTA community i can see it. i can see the oppression in my own behavior and language. when we are powerless, we want power, and we express that power in the ways we learned. thus it makes sense, to me at least, that israel would act the way it does, and for its spin machine to spin as fast as possible so that it can legitimize its actions. the state of israel, and my own state, needs to be right.
and so what do we do with all the reports coming in the aftermath of the attack on the flotilla? i can’t speak for we, i can speak for me. me, i read them – as many as i can. i mourn the dead and injured, i can read the spin with an open mind acknowledging that even peace activists can be moved to violence when threatened, i can be grateful that this attack is causing a greater dialogue about the siege on gaza, i can continue to pray that the suffering of the palestinians and israelis will stop, soon. that’s easy though. i’m quite distanced from all of that. i can also take what i’m thinking about peace and oppression in israel and palestine and apply it to my own life and try to hold those who inflict (perceived) injury on me in light rather than dark. i can spend time thinking about the impacts of peace in my personal life on peace in the bigger world.
that’s all hippy-dippy-touchy-feely-crap, i know that. it’s not practical. but in times like this – when the world is full of such uncertainty and people suffering all over because of the actions of others of us – we need a bit of the touchy-feely-hippy-dippy-crap. we need some hope and peace.
and i’ll finish with this, sabeel’s (short) litany for gaza:
Eternal God, arbiter of justice and champion of peace, reach into the deep pit of violence, despair, and ruthlessness that shapes the lives of so many in Palestine and Israel. The nations are in an uproar, kingdoms totter, people cry out.
You, O God, are our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Grant, O God, healing to the men and women injured during the Israeli military assault. Bring grace and consolation to those who mourn the dead.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled.
God who has proclaimed release to the captives and freedom to the oppressed, may all who have been taken prisoner for their involvement in the flotilla return safely home. We remember these and others who are unjustly detained.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, who has sent me to proclaim release to the captives…and to let the oppressed go free.
Lord of all, make known to all in Palestine and Israel that your love extends to all people, that might is not right, that fear begets fear, that love conquers all. Give hope to the many who, in love, speak and act boldly for justice.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
God of Justice, we pray that the nations of the world will no longer stand idly by, but uphold the rights of the oppressed in Gaza, the West Bank, and around the globe . We, the peoples of many lands, “reaffirm [our] faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” [UN Charter: Preamble]
Your judgements are just, O Lord, you will hold all nations accountable for what they have done, and also for what they have left undone.
God who offers life in abundance, break the chains of injustice that shackle the people of Gaza. May the blockade that limits food and medicine, toys and cement, culture and trade, friendships and families be swiftly ended. May the people of Gaza and of the West Bank be brought together in unity.
They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. [Isaiah 65]
God of equity, who knows no distinction between race or creed or colour, help us to be ever impatient in our encounter with injustice and abuse. As ambassadors for Christ, do not allow our hearts to be hardened, but let us live your message of justice, peace and reconciliation. We remember the words of your prophet: “The effect of justice will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever. My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.” [Isaiah 32:16-18]
change is afoot in this household. while my timeline to be done with my phd is a year from now, i’m already applying for jobs. yes, change is scarily afoot in this household. and i don’t like it. honestly, it’s stressful – this job hunt. plus i don’t have a lot of confidence in myself and i hate self promotion, so writing a cover letter is stupidly hard for me*. also afoot is change in treatment for the chronic illness that i live with. it is good change, but it’s unknown and change is change, and i struggle with it**. oh, and i haven’t even mentioned my father, and the change afoot there..
now, i’m an avoider, an avid avoider. so tonight to help me avoid i’ve been watching tv while working on a cover letter and reading through an article that i get to contribute my knowledge of my dissertation topic to. tonight the remote landed on a movie on some network devoted to all things green. this particular movie is about mountain top coal removal and why it’s bad. i may consider myself more of an oregonian these days than virginian, but i grew up in those mountains. not only did i grow up in those mountains, i also grew up on the rivers.. particularly the new river at mccoy falls & it’s gorge up in fayetteville. now i’ve never seen an appalachian mountain cut off, but if i did i’d be disturbed. imagine being on beautiful river surrounded by the rolling hills that are the old wise appalachian mountains and then coming around a bend and seeing the top of the mountain in front of you covered not in the dense greenery that you’ve been basking in but rather looking like a moonscape. the moon is gorgeous, but not in the middle of the appalachian mountains. here’s the trailer for the movie i’m watching.
*as for the professional stuff – i’m lucky to have a variety of personalities on my dissertation committee. on monday i’m meeting with one of my committee members – the one from the pacific northwest and who speaks both hippie-dippie and academia. he’s going to give me both a lesson on speaking academia and a confidence boost.
**as for the treatment change – i’ve got a great doc who is being super supportive with this change.
Gene Stotzfus, founder of the CPTdied on 10 March. I didn’t even know he was one of the founders of this organization, I just know the organization exists and that my participation on a Palestine / Israel delegation 2 years ago profoundly changed my life. Not only did it change where I choose to put what little energy I have for political things these days, but it also impacted my faith in ways I could not have predicted. I am a more faithful person now than I have ever been, and my relationship with God – while still tenuous, is stronger as well. To that end - I feel sadness that the founder has died, and immense gratitude that he lived.
Against Discouragement
Spelman College Commencement Address, May 2005
By Howard Zinn
[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College in Atlanta GA, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]
I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.
But this is your day — the students graduating today. It’s a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.
My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is at war — still another war, war after war — and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this country, and homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.
But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must not be discouraged.
I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in office, was looking the other way while Black people were beaten and killed and denied the opportunity to vote. So Black people in the South decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do — enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said: The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That’s when democracy came alive.
I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was bombing the villages of Vietnam — bombing schools and hospitals and killing ordinary people in huge numbers — it looked hopeless to try to stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to end.
The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies. I know you have practical things to do — to get jobs and get married and have children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.
Remember Tolstoy’s story, “The Death of Ivan Illych.” A man on his deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that he must write against war and militarism.
My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself — whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist — you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.
Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border into the United States. This was horrifying to me — the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call “civilization,” we have carved up what we claim is one world into two hundred artificially created entities we call “nations” and are ready to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.
Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to those in power, deadly for those out of power.
Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But if you know some history you know that’s not true. If you know some history, you know we massacred Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico, sent armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge numbers of people, and we did not bring them democracy or liberty. We did not go into Vietnam to bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop the drug trade; we did not invade Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims were the aims of all the other empires of world history — more profit for corporations, more power for politicians.
The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the Black poets especially are less enthralled with the virtues of American “liberty” and “democracy,” their people having enjoyed so little of it. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:
You really haven’t been a virgin for so long.
It’s ludicrous to keep up the pretext.You’ve slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you’ve taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows.
Being one of the world’s big vampires,
Why don’t you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.
I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a “good war,” but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.
My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought up in a world without war. It we want a world in which the people of all countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are considered as our children, then war — in which children are always the greatest casualties — cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.
I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from 1956 to 1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those years have remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and our two children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white people would ask: How is it to be living in the Black community? It was hard to explain. But we knew this — that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as if we were in alien territory, and when we came back to the Spelman campus, we felt that we were at home.
Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the most educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned from me. Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson.
I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point — that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us — of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality — are human beings and should cherish one another.
I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can read all about that in Harry Lefever’s book Undaunted By The Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1967.
One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was my student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested in the Atlanta sit-ins, came to our house on campus to show us a petition she was about to put on the bulletin board of her dormitory. The heading on the petition epitomized the transformation taking place at Spelman College. Marian had written on top of the petition: “Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please Sign Below.”
My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you. There are wonderful people, Black and white, who are models. I don’t mean African-Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work for peace and justice.
Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer’s family in Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first published poems, she wrote:
It is true —
I’ve always loved
the daring
ones
Like the Black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.
I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break down barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you can — you don’t have to do something heroic, just something, to join with millions of others who will just do something, because all of those somethings, at certain points in history, come together, and make the world better.
That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn’t do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn’t do what Black people wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap for the sun — you may not reach it, but at least you will get off the ground.
By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap My hope for you is a good life.
yes, i heard about the situation in haiti on tuesday afternoon.. i think i heard about it through twitter. like many, when i heard, i was horrified about the situation. it was being posted all over twitter and i was glad to see that people cared.
but it didn’t take too long for me to get angry about the reaction. why anger? i know, crazy reaction – anger when people care. i’m angry at the the haiti stuff, not because people are caring and not because people in haiti don’t need the help, but because – here’s the thing – these horrors in haiti, are happening all over the world, every day. i think about the siege on gaza and how the 1.5 million people there are struggling to simply live while israel enforces it and the US, egypt and the rest of the world just let it happen. and then darfur and sudan and how the genocide has been going on there for longer than any genocide should (a genocide shouldn’t ever go on, fwiw, but the world has known for a long time now and it is still happening). and colombia, east timor, afghanistan, ethiopia, pakistan, and haiti before the quake.. and i know the list could go on and on and on. and the same people i see twittering for haiti, most of those same people i have never ever seen comment about another country who’s people are living the same daily horrors that the people of haiti are living. yes, there are babies, children, young people and old people living out under the stars, not knowing where their next meal is coming from all over the world.. only the difference in non-natural disasters is that those people don’t know if help is ever going to come, if the world does care.
and it makes me angry – so suddenly there is a natural disaster and people care about different parts of the world? i actually posted yesterday “if americans cared half as much about gaza as they do about haiti then gaza would be free.” and what about the rest of the world where americans could use their power to stop daily horrors around the world, not just gaza or the west bank? it would be huge, and powerful, and truly a miracle. but with some situations – afghanistan, the west bank & gaza for instance – america would have to apologize because we either a) caused it and/ or b) support it with our tax dollars. and americans are not a group of people to apologize. and in other places americans would have to move from crisis – which we are so good at – to caring long enough to force the hand of the american government to demand that these genocides stop. yes, for places like the sudan & darfur, americans would have to force the government’s hand to do something, which will take all these people caring right now for haiti to care this much for a long period of time. but we didn’t cause the situation in sudan? we didn’t cause the situation in bosnia either and we sent military there, and iraq – cripes we started 2 wars in iraq and the same with afghanistan. when this country of mine wants something to happen it will go as far as to break international law to make it so.
but we’re not good at this. and as a group we won’t do this, because the advantage of crisis is that we can care for a few minutes and then go back to our lives. the advantage of crisis is that we can appear to be the good person to those in our networks and then go back to our lives without really doing anything to make a difference.
in a week america is going to not care as much, and we are going to go back to our normal situation as always, until the next natural disaster. and then we’ll care again for a week or so. and the cycle will continue until people in this country really wake up. maybe what is happening in sudan, gaza, colombia will have to happen here, to the white middle and upper class for people here to care for more than a week. that is incredibly sad that that is the case, but it probably is going to be. and after haiti is rebuilt there will still be people living under stars, not knowing where their next meal or drink of water is coming from, terrified about what may happen to them next and most americans will be happily in their little world convinced that what they did for haiti was heroic and now they don’t get to care anymore.
i’m in the process of reading a blog entry by alice walker (yes, that alice walker) about her trip to gaza with CODEPINK. her story begins with a partial account of her trip to rwanda and then she links gaza and rwanda. throughout the piece she reminisces about her experience in the south as black woman and she reminds us of the similarities between the palestinians struggle and the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s. it truly is a piece of work from the heart and makes me continue to question my decision to stay here in logan to finish this degree instead of going and doing what i consider is the most noble work of all – being on the ground with the oppressed who’s lives and homes are being ripped apart with the help of my tax dollars.
you should take time and go read the whole post, and to entice you here are a couple excerpts from it:
here she writes of a meeting she had with the american ambassador to egypt (a white woman from the south):
Even so, I was able to have an interesting talk with the Ambassador about the use of non-violence. She, a white woman with a southern accent, mentioned the success of “our” Civil Rights Movement and why couldn’t the Palestinians be more like us. It was a remarkable comment from a perspective of unimaginable safety and privilege; I was moved to tell her of the effort it took, even for someone so inherently non-violent as me, to contain myself during seven years in Mississippi when it often appeared there were only a handful of white Mississippians who could talk to a person of color without delivering injury or insult. That if we had not been able to change our situation through non-violent suffering, we would most certainly, like the ANC, like the PLO, like Hamas, turned to violence. I told her how dishonest it seems to me that people claim not to understand the desperate, last ditch, resistance involved in suicide bombings; blaming the oppressed for using their bodies where the Israeli army uses armored tanks. I remembered aloud, us being Southerners, my own anger at the humiliations, bombings, assassinations that made weeping an endless activity for black people, for centuries, and how when we finally got to a court room which was supposed to offer justice, the judge was likely to blame us for the crime done against us and to call us chimpanzees for making a fuss.
and here she writes about entering gaza:
Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the “rez”. To the “colored section.” In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase. When I lived in segregated Eatonton, Georgia I used to breathe normally only in my own neighborhood, only in the black section of town. Everywhere else was too dangerous. A friend was beaten and thrown in prison for helping a white girl, in broad daylight, fix her bicycle chain. But even this sliver of a neighborhood, so rightly named the Gaza strip, was not safe. It had been bombed for 22 days.
i hate b0rd3rs books.. i hate what it does to small book sellers.. EXCEPT for the fact that they often have great prices on books that i really want – have been wanting, or didn’t know i wanted. 2 months ago i found jimmy carter’s book “palestine: peace not apartheid” for $5.00.. originally $23. last year i found one of anne lamott’s books. today i found this:
“we shall overcome: hear the history of the civil rights movement as it happened.” $6.00.. originally $45. as i was checking out the nice lady asked me if i had one of their cards and i told her no. no, because i shouldn’t be shopping there, but they do have excellent bargain books.. such as this. and so i opened it up and i showed her what is on the cd’s.. original speeches and recordings from the time. i told her ‘this is a book about the history they don’t talk enough about in school. this is a book about peace, not war. in they only focus on war… that’s your lecture from a local pacificst.’
yes, i love books. i adore them. i love beautiful books that i can literally stroke pages and soak in what is offered. i have another book like this – national geographic’s ‘peace: the biography of a symbol’ that i lucked into the fellow who helped on it – mike sweeney – was (up until june of 09) my friend ppp’s boss and a member of my church. he gave me a copy of the book and signed it. it’s a beautiful book about another topic that needs to be indoctrinated into the heads of our school children. i’ve not read the whole thing, just parts, but when i pick it up i carefully stroke the pages and get to soak in a bit of the content just through those strokes.
okay, i’m rambling. yesterday bit the big one, today was better. tomorrow i may go camping with FPC. right now i should work on something my prof wants me to do to get me to move forward with my dissertation proposal. i’m going to go down to the church because i think it may be air conditioned.
oh, and if anyone is interested in getting a copy of these recordings, let me know. i’ll figure out a way of getting them too you.. i’m awfully flakey, but i may be able to upload the individual files.
why do i care about these cats? mainly because every time i look at the ibkc website – even in my darkest moments – something in me lightens just a bit (i go to the ibkc website too many times a day). that reason alone is enough for me to care. i also care because my sweet p cat is a humane society rescue and i’ve had to use a humane society myself. the humane societies do good work – at least i believe they do.
you’ve gotten this far. have you clicked on the links to francine and selma? have you gone over to the ibkc website and looked at all the other pictures of some of the cutest kittens ever? well, before you decide whether to donate or not, go over to the itty bitty kitty committee and spend 20 minutes just looking at the archives – then decide.
when you do decide to donate – you can easily do so. even if you can’t donate much (i couldn’t) – every dollar counts.
the abstract: i'm brooke - a blogger since election day of 2000, keeping track of the various phases of my life. my previous phase? i was a peace and justice activist in eugene, oregon, my current phase? being a phd student in utah. these are my adventures and neurotic musings as i move through this process, in this place.
expand the abstract? go to the about page.
The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will become worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven
readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s
on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a
quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.
~ Arundhati Roy
be grateful for whoever comes… each has been sent as a guide from beyond. ~rumi
Recent Comments