I do love it when I find support for my position among women a whole lot smarter than I am.
The war’s consequences on feminism and the international community were the focus of a panel discussion held at Cornell University on March 25.
The opening speaker addressed the positions of organizations such as Code Pink, which confronts “war as a women’s issue.” Code Pink claims that current ideologies of international politics are poisoned because they are “dominated by testosterone and a military which engenders a culture of aggression.”
[Pardon me, but wooo hooo. Wasn’t that what I was just recently saying??]
The five panelists were Prof. Marcia Greenberg, law; Jane Marie Law, the H. Stanley Krushen Professor of World Religions; Prof. Andrea Parrot, policy analysis and management; Prof. Anna Marie Smith, government and Christine Cuomo, Society for the Humanities postdoctoral fellow.

We will continue to fight to protect our rights as American citizens and the rights of all people worldwide to live in peace. This is what democracy looks like.
This is the final statement of a letter from a member of Women Against War that I posted. It deserves repeating because the message tends to get lost in the confusing “support the troops; oppose the war” rhetoric.
We must continue to “fight” for peace — not with physical force, but with open, public, non-violent, articulate protest. We must fight by becoming involved in trying to affect local policies and politics. We must fight with more than peaceful words; we fight with non-violent actions. While words have power, until that power is used to craft and implement intelligent action, the power of words is simply potential.
We must continue to “fight” with protests that are peaceful, orderly, organized, and informed. If the choice is made for civil disobedience, it must be made recognizing that there are consequences to breaking the law. We must continue the widespread sharing of both factual and personally-experienced information from around the world; this kind of information is fundamental to empowering the ordinary citizen to understand his/her choices and to make those choices only after critical and compassionate analysis and discussion.
That is how we fight we for freedom — by modeling democratic methods. That’s what will change the world into a planet of collaborating democracies. Not war. Not physical force. Not propaganda. Not even intellectual arguments. But by modeling — both individually and nationally — what we expect others to emulate.
This is what democracy looks like.

SOUTHEAST OF BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A U.S. Marine commander said on Saturday American troops would use overwhelming force to crush any resistance if ordered to storm Baghdad and that the battle would cost many civilian lives.
Marines say there are signs that much of the Iraqi military has decided to give up, but U.S.-led forces are ready if necessary to take on a bloody house-to-house fight for control of the capital.
“We’re not going to tip-toe into the city, it will be a forceful knock-out punch every time we go in,” said U.S. Marine Captain Matt Watt, commander of Lima Company, a unit of mechanized infantry trained in urban warfare.
“We’ll make sure there’s no capability for the enemy to resist us, we’ll go in shooting up every time,” he told Reuters.
“We have to go in forcefully, and when we go in forcefully it just creates a lot of collateral damage.”
Boy, those Iraqis sure make our soldiers do terrible things, don’t they?

I’m really displeased that I can’t send an email to earthlink.net complaining that someone/s using their email service is purposely sending me infected emails. You can’t email earthlink unless you have an account with them. If anyone reading this has an earthlink account, could you please tell them that I’m getting viruses that originate from these ID addresses, and I sure hope that there is something that they can do to stop it:
E191Zwz-0007BO-00@swan.mail.pas.earthlink.net
E191Zta-0007bh-00@hawk.mail.pas.earthlink.net
And I was really amused to see blogging featured on the last episode of “Judging Amy,” as one of Judge Amy’s staff people gathers info for her new weblog and Amy’s pre-teen daughter, Loren, explains to her mother what a weblog is. Cool.

President Dumbya, again, makes another really bad decision. He plans to refuse help from the U.N. in any post-war effort to rebuild Iraq. This from truemajority.com, where you can go to send a free fax opposing Bush’s plan:
Even if the war in Iraq ends today, we would need to address the depth of grief and misery that the people of Iraq confront – and will face indefinitely.
The supplemental budget bill delivered to Congress last week falls far short in resolving the likely humanitarian crisis caused by the war.
It’s essential that our nation stand behind its commitment to heal Iraq, to make certain that the Iraqi people receive the food, medicine, and support that they need. It’s time for us to begin inspiring the world community with our hearts, instead of alienating it with our guns.
That’s why America’s humanitarian and reconstruction work in Iraq must be conducted with the full cooperation of the international community. We should reaffirm our commitment to the United Nations by joining with it in the healing process in Iraq.
Unfortunately, the Bush Administration is poised to conduct its humanitarian efforts in Iraq with the same disastrous “go-it-alone” approach that it used in the war. Tell Congress to 1) ensure that our nation partners fully with the United Nations for all humanitarian work in Iraq, and 2) provide the humanitarian resources needed to inspire awe even among our enemies.
And, yes, I know that will mean my tax dollars going toward that effort. I don’t mind as long as Bush’s additional plan to give rich people a tax break is defeated. Fair is fair.

Years ago, I applied to a week-long poetry workshop that Marge Piercy was giving at the Omega Institute. I like to think that I applied too late, but the truth is that I wasn’t accepted. But I still am a big Piercy fan. Here’s an example of why:
Flying over the Nebraska of my life
Marge Piercy, Colors Passing Through Us, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
So much of our lives dissolves.
What did I do the day before
I met you? You remember
what I was wearing that holiday.
What did I wear the next morning?
What did I write the day my mother died?
I fly at night over the plains.
There is a cluster of lights,
a starfish shape glittering. Then
darkness and darkness.
Then another clump bearing
long daisy petals of roadway.
Then nothing again. How much
of my living has fled like water
into sand. The sand is not
even damp to the hand.
Tears and wine and sparkling
water all vanish the same.
I know looking out the plane’s
dirty window that there are houses,
barns, roads, trees, stores
distinct in that darkness I once
drove through. I knew them and will
never know them again.
The plane is flying from lighted
place to lighted place, but
our arc is from the dark into
brightness then back into darkness.
I want to possess my own life like a
necklace, pearl by pearl of light.
And I also really liked her future-world novel He, She, It, even though I’m in the vast minority on that.

I love it when my theater-trained daughter does her imitation of Kathryn Hepburn. Hepburn had such an individual style and such a remarkable acting talent.
As writer who

I don

This is a letter to the Editor published in my local paper. The secretary in my former office pointed me to it because she said that when she started reading it, she thought I wrote it. I don

My sense of humor, that is. Or have I ever really had one to begin with?
I