Here is a young man who was interrogated in Chicago for taking a picture of one of the cartoon marketing lights which caused so much hysteria in Boston yesterday. What kind of a country have we become?
Here’s his story:
Virtual flowers and all best wishes to Molly Ivins as she goes. From the WILPF mailing list:
I’m sorry the news I bring is so dire, but many are wondering: Molly Ivins is indeed losing her fight with cancer. She’s out of the hospital and back at home, on life support with organ failure. She is lucid some of the time, and spending her last hours with close friends and relatives.
She asks that no more flowers or cards be sent as she is overwhelmed, and certainly visitors are a burden at this point (she knows you are with her in spirit). Please send prayers, love, good wishes…
UPDATE: And now they are reporting that Molly has died. Fare thee well, you wonderful woman! You did good work.
UPDATE: The Texas Observer remembers Molly with incredible pictures and words.
UPDATE: Molly’s last column: Stand Up Against the Surge
That’s what Lt. Gen Odom (ret.) said on CNN:
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
-Molly Ivins
“…It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin…we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. …”
He won’t be missed. I only hope the country doesn’t blow up even further now.
But let’s not forget who helped to create him.
In the end, Saddam’s execution only underscores our plight. By the time his neck snapped and his feet swung, Saddam was but a diminished eccentric. His death, once supposed to be the final, glorious denouement of the war, is just a discomfiting reminder that we know only how to destroy, not rebuild. Saddam is dead. Zarqawi is dead. There is no one left to kill or capture who will end this nightmare. In the end, they were just more bodies, tossed atop the pyre in Iraq, where so many others have burned, and where the flames show no sign of extinguishing.
UPDATE: Thanks for the memories!
They Dance Alone
Why are there women here dancing on their own?
Why is there this sadness in their eyes?
Why are the soldiers here
Their faces fixed like stone?
I can’t see what it is that they despise.
They’re dancing with the missing
They’re dancing with the dead
They dance with the invisible ones
Their anguish is unsaid.
They’re dancing with their fathers
They’re dancing with their sons
They’re dancing with their husbands
They dance alone
They dance alone …
Hey Mr. Pinochet
You’ve sown a bitter crop
That foreign money that supports you
One day the money’s going to stop.
No wages for your torturers
No budget for your guns
Can you think of your own mother
Dancing with her invisible son? …
One day we’ll dance on their graves
One day we’ll sing our freedom
One day we’ll laugh in our joy
And we’ll dance
And we’ll dance
— Sting
