I"m both enjoying and despairing at watching so many people around me in my real life, have a gold-fish-like collective memory that only goes back as far as the last frequently-shown news image.
Today everyone remembers this graphic footage, complete with disturbing audio, of an American get decapitated by an Iraqi.
Days before that, the could only remember the pile of naked Iraqi civilian prisoners withe female guard giving the thumbs-up sign
Before that they could only remember the American building contractors being hung from a bridge ,
Ect.

Today I had a person who sits ONE DESK away from me use company email to forward one of those multi-forwarded emails with all the >>> 'greater than' signs at the beginning of each line.
She sent it to me and about 10 other people in our office. It was about people in line at an American grocery store proudly harassing a Burqua-wearing Iraqi woman about how she wouldn't have the privilege of being there among them if our soldiers hadn't liberated her. In spite of the fact she knows I teach English to refugees and am active in immigrant rights, and in spite of the fact that one of the other people on the list is from Nigeria. Oh well here it is...

Subject: FW: (no subject)




> As some of you may know, one of my sons serves in the military. He is still stateside, here in California. He called me yesterday to let me know how warm and welcoming people were to him, and his troops, everywhere he goes, telling me how people shake their hands, and thank them for being willing to serve, and fight, for not only our own freedoms but so that others may have them also. But he also told me about an incident in the grocery store he stopped at yesterday, on his way home from the base.

>

>He said that ahead of several people in front of him stood a woman dressed in a burkha. He said when she got to the cashier she loudly remarked about the US flag lapel pin the cashier wore on her smock.

>The cashier reached up and touched the pin, and said proudly, "yes, I always wear it and I probably always will."

>

>The woman in the burkha then asked the cashier when she was going to stop bombing her countrymen, explaining that she was Iraqi.

>

>A gentleman standing behind my son stepped forward, putting his arm around my son's shoulders, and nodding towards my son, said in a calm and gentle voice to the Iraqi woman: "Lady, hundreds of thousands of men and women like this young man have fought and died so that YOU could stand here, in MY country and accuse a check-out cashier of bombing YOUR countrymen. It is

>my belief that had you been this outspoken in YOUR own country, we wouldn't need to be there today. But, hey, if you have now learned how to speak out so loudly and clearly, I'll gladly buy you a ticket and pay your way back to Iraq so you can straighten out the mess in YOUR country that you are obviously here in MY country to avoid." Everyone within hearing distance cheered.

>

>Pass it on....


I FUCKING NEED A NEW JOB!

It is Saturday May 8, 2004 at about 1:00 pm.
It was my turn to work the Saturday 8:00 - 1:00 shift in my office, we take turns doing it alone. And wouldn't you know it my husband had a church class scheduled at that same time, so I brought both my kids to work with me.

When I was a kid, for a few months, my mom had to clean the neighborhood LDS church and scrub its floors so we could receive "Church Welfare" while my dad was out of town. And apparently it wasn't tragic enough to me and my little sister that my way-pregnant no-car mom had to walk there, then get down on her hands and knees and scrub scuff-marks off the floor in order to receive aid from a church to which we had always given 10% of our gross-income in the past. We insisted we wanted to watch saturday morning cartoons while we were there, so we wouldnt have to miss those few hours per week that tv acually used to show cartoons back then. So our mom put our portable tv in our red wagon and lugged it all the way there, on our walk.

So I brought our portable tv, with Nintendo Game Cube and the game Animal Crossing attached, in the trunk of my car, and brought it up the elevator with us, in our red wagon, partly in honor of that memory. And partly to keep them busy for 5 hours. Also crackers, juice boxes , and microwave popcorn. My son found a can of coke on this up-for-grabs snack table my department keeps and has already spilled it right under my chair at my desk, I have soaked up most of it that I can, out of the carpet, with paper towels, but its always going to look like I peed or barfed or something on this carpet, I'm afraid.

So few phone calls this morning, why was this even necessary?

Last week end I bought a $23 box of American Sign Language Magnetic Poetry magnets, brought them to work, and was horrified to find out that of the 340 "sign language tiles" advertized on the box, the great majority are letters of the alphabet over and over again, and about 30 or 40 actual word signs. Plus I had already lost the receipt. So I sent out an email to about 30 or 40 people in my department to say "free American Sign Language alpahbet magnets at my desk, come get them, have fun, spell your name." A lot of people visited me to say they know some sign language, or want to learn it, and a deaf lady said she'd teach me anything I want to know...so maybe they weren't such a waste of money!

Like so many others, I'm horrified by the pictures of the abuse by American soldiers against Iraqi prisoners of war. If this is how we treat people who ARE covered by the Geniva Convention, how are we treating those held at Guantanimo Bay, who are not. Never mind, we already know. I appreciated what a comentator on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart had to say, President Bush's non-appology statements on Iraqi TV just seem to be saying, "Don't judge us by the actions of a...um... well, don't judge us by our actions. " And, "Just because it's something we DID, doesn't mean it's something we WOULD DO!"

Good lord my kids are running around on my office's 4th floor balcony outside. I have to go rescue them. It is time to go.