come to me, september

Classes began with great promise.

Some of the highways Laurel and I drove on a month ago are gone.

I went to every one of those big massive anti-war protests before the Iraq invasion started, but since I left DC I can hardly bear to have anything to do with Iraq. It is hard to remember how hard everyone worked. It's painful to remember how people made themselves keep hoping the war could be prevented, just so we could keep doing the work. When I went to those rallies with hundreds of thousands of people I would feel hopeful again, and I would go back in to the office and work as if there was still a chance. Now, peace rallies are memorials for people who died because we couldn't stop it. It makes me feel hollow. I am letting other people pick up the hope-stoking for me for a while. There were no Crawford trips for me.

But I did go see Cindy Sheehan and her compañeros today when they got to Austin. One soldier who came back from Iraq said "At Camp Casey I found the America I thought I had lost." Loving community/right to be heard=these things are capable of incredible feats of healing, I think. I don't love all of Ms. Sheehan's rhetoric and I am not optimistic about future prospects for democracy or stability in Iraq or a U.S. military withdrawal but like I said, that's why I'm leaving the hoping to other people for a little while.