Part of my assignment for the new Kids On Wheels magazine is writing serial fiction. I haven't written fiction in many years, and when I did, it was for teenagers; the KOW audience is 8-12 years old. I'm quietly freaking out, wondering how on earth I'm going to meet this challenge. I know I'll come up with something, but will it be anything anyone would ever want to read? To start my mind working along age-appropriate lines, I've been re-familiarizing myself with classic books for the reading level. I chose five: The Phantom Tollboth by Norton Juster, A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle (one of my favorites when I was that age), the incomparable Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, From The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg, and the modern classic Holes by Louis Sachar. Everyone should read Holes , it is brilliant. It was also make into an excellent movie, with a screenplay written, thank goodness, by the author. All this r...
It's all too much. Sometimes I wish I believed in hell and a vengeful god. If anyone deserves to burn, it's this administration. I'd settle for life in prison, though.
ReplyDeleteYou may have heard that the Quakers are organizing a series of vigils and memorials for the day the count hits 2000.
ReplyDeleteThe ever-bizarre Michelle Malkin characterized the memorials thus:
THE GHOULS OF THE LEFT
They support the troops... by partying over their deaths.
Sick.
But it's par for the course.
How can you deal with people who think like Malkin?
Of course, what sort of clear thinking do you really expect from a Japanese-American famous for writing a book defending the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII?
It's a beautiful statement. Cindy Sheehan is such a brave person, risking the pain and defamation she does by speaking out. I also want to salute her for remembering the mothers of Iraq... so often forgotten when even those among us remember only the fallen 2000. The mothers and fathers of Iraq feel just as keenly those things one of those mothers Cindy quoted feels. But many many thousands more of them have been forced to feel it. How many thousands more have died "saved" from Saddam than would have suffered and died even under his tyranny? How can that ever be set right? I don't think it can. It's not hyperbole... there are people in the United States today who are, quite literally, war criminals... but circumstances almost guarantee they will die warm and safe in their luxurious beds. It's enough to make me pray that there really is a Purgatory, where the suffering they have caused will be reviewed for them in its tiniest detail for year after year until they finally understand and sincerely repent, and only then will they be worthy of forgiveness. But that's probably just a fairytale, and justice is a scarce commodity in this universe.
ReplyDeleteSay it.
ReplyDeleteI used to love that now-popular quote from Theodore Parker (a theologian who greatly influenced Martin Luther King Jr.): "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice".
Then I decided I liked it so much because I wished it were true.