Yesterday afternoon I saw Howard Dean at a fundraiser for the National Democratic Committee with my mom and my friend Amy. It was held at the infamous Hilton on Michigan Avenue, the site of riots during the democratic convention in 1968, and within earshot of the last day of the Chicago Blues Fest. Across the street from the hotel two lonely republicans held up a spray painted sign that said "Dean's DNC=Obstruction + Hate." They looked pretty sad over there alone, but I didn't go over to keep them company. Call me crazy!

Dean made some important points. Here's a list of some of what he covered:

• he said first off that the Democrats believe in social and economic justice;
• he talked about the party's moral values and how the republicans talk about moral values but their actions are anything but moral;
• he said the president's plan to dismantle social security was an attempt to "destroy our community," saying that we care about each other and don't want to see a large percentage of our neighbors suffering when they reach retirement age;
• on that note, he said that pensions should be transferrable;
• he compared the democratic party of today to the republican party of the 70s: we are the party of fiscal responsibility and defenders of individual freedoms;
• he said that the dems believe in public education because we think that everyone should have an opportunity to succeed, regardless of which class they were born into;
• he said the dems want universal health coverage (a two-tiered system like in other industrial, democratic nations) because they have moral values and we don't want to see children without healthcare;
• he also said that because of our moral values we don't want to see children go hungry every night;
• he made a short mention of Iraq, but no mention of Afghanistan;
• his most lengthy point was the need for dems to rearticulate "choice" because it's assumed that "pro-choice" is "pro-abortion" though no dems are pro-abortion. He said that we should abandon the word "choice" and start to say what it's really about: that we don't think Tom Delay or anyone else in congress should be deciding women's health care. She should be able to have control over her own health care, with the consultation of her doctor.

That's about it. I was impressed with his discussion of abortion, but I was disappointed by a few things. He seems to feel he has to quote from the Bible and give Christian lessons at every appearance, I guess to keep up with the republicans. I think this is too bad; he doesn't know the Bible very well and it shows. Plus, it would be great if someone in the party said "my religion is my business, not yours," and insisted that religion be a private matter. (I don't see that happening any time soon!) Why force it in a speech when it's not natural? Plus, I was upset that he didn't talk about Iraq and Afghanistan more. The democrats have an opportunity to lead on this, but they're not. Why can't the dems just say they were for the war because they believed and trusted the president, something you ought to be able to do, but that now that they know it was all a bunch of lies and that they were duped they no longer support the president. It seems pretty simple to me. I wish they weren't so afraid of talking about Iraq and Afghanistan. Someone's got to talk about the reality over there if anything's going to change.

The whole thing was a little depressing. I wanted to feel energized and hopeful, but I didn't. I think Dean is the best chance we have for the party (not as a candidate, as a chairman) because he's a man of conviction and he believes what he says. But we're so far behind these days, and the country's headed into such a precarious future, I don't know if there's any hope. I guess time will tell!

I just heard Kenneth Feinberg, the attorney charged with distributing the 9/11 victim compensation funds to the families, on Terry Gross' Fresh Air. The statute he was working under, developed by the congress immediately after 9/11, made it impossible for him to evenly distribute the funds and forced him to create a calculus of "worth" based on what the victim had earned and would have earned (supposedly) in the future. This meant, in the end, that the family of a 28 year old stock broker would be awarded millions while the family of a 45 year old firefighter would receive hundreds of thousands. The "worth" was only related to earnings, in essence turning people into abstract workers no different than Marx did more than a century ago. Feinberg insisted that this was the "American way" since this is how juries have always awarded victims' families. A stock broker is worth more than a firefighter to jurors, apparently, and therefore he's worth more to the 9/11 fund too.

The interview was disturbing to me because it pointed out how our culture rewards earning money over everything else, and that it is our monetary "worth" that matters, not our contributions to society or our immediate community. Neither Gross nor Feinberg addressed the issue of "worth" to a culture, community, or society. It could be argued, I think, that a firefighter contributed more, was "worth" more to New York, than a stock broker, and therefore his loss impacted more people. Do we not calculate this sort of loss because it's so hard to assign monetary value to something "priceless," or is it because we are so selfish, so driven by greed, that we don't even recognize this kind of worth?

The past decade or so in the non-profit world there's been a push to talk about philanthropy as social investment and to encourage donors to see themselves as stakeholders, not unlike the people directly benefiting from the non-profit's services. It's a way of trying to get us to think about "worth" in a whole new light. Remember all of the criticism of the American Red Cross after 9/11 when a group of donors asked for their money back after they found out that their donation wasn't necessarily going to victims, but instead to the Red Cross' work overall? It struck me as ludicrous that people questioned how their $25 donation was spent by the Red Cross (and that they were unhappy that some of that money might go to hurricane and flood victims, people in need of blood transfusions, etc. etc.), even though most of those same donors wouldn't bat an eye at spending $150 for a pair of Nikes. Do we ask Nike how they spent that money, or if those shoes are "worth" $150? Or even if it was fairly distributed? No. We don't care that the people making the shoes got paid next to nothing and most of the profits went to Nike executives. Are the shoes really "worth" $150, while the Red Cross is not even "worth" $25?

It's sick that we even have to decide who's "worth" more. It's worse, though, that the "worth" is based on wage earnings and not on our contributions to society as a whole. I'm glad the 9/11 families received assistance. The whole thing, though, strikes me as sordid. Dividing the money up equally would have been better, I think. Even if, as Feinberg argues, the scaled compensation model is more "American."

I wonder how much this abstraction of the "worth" of human life leads us to divide people into "us" and "them." This division makes it easier for us to dehumanize "them," the necessary first step toward torture and killing. I heard about a new exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society, "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" on a local NPR program, 848. The photographs and postcards were "souvenirs"; some had notes written on the back talking about the fun time the family had at the neighborhood lynching. White people would bring picnics and pose next to the corpse for pictures. Some people took human remains as souvenirs, including teeth and fingers. The major period of lynchings lasted from the 1870s into the 1930s, though of course there were lynchings before and for decades after. The curator of the exhibit talked about the importance of examining the history of lynchings in order to see how even Americans are capable of dehumanizing others, and therefore how vigilant we need to be to prevent abhorrent violence of this nature. It's timely because congress is just now issuing an apology for never passing an anti-lynching law, and, too, because of Amnesty International's recent report, "Guantanamo and beyond: The continuing pursuit of unchecked power."

In many ways we dehumanize soldiers, too. They are abstractions. Sometimes they are political abstractions, used by the left and the right. Daniel, a stop-lossed linguist in Iraq, wrote about this in a brilliant piece a few weeks ago. It's easy for those of us with loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan to know they are not abstractions at all, but flesh and blood men and women who are loved and give love. But I have to remind myself how hard it is for others to remember this, and how much easier it is to see people like my husband as "soldiers," an abstract, inhuman notion. Their deaths are easy to take when they're "soldiers" and not mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, uncles and aunts, best friends. Sometimes I think it would be better if our press, when showing portraits of the dead, showed pictures of the men and women out of uniform at home with their families or out with their friends. Then we would see that these soldiers were people just like us, that they could have been our neighbors, our loved ones, our friends.

We lose a bit of our own humanity when we dehumanize others, or even when we ask ourselves what a life was "worth."

How can our nation's two preeminent daily newspapers have come to such  dramatically different conclusions about the same British memo?

Deep in the middle of the first section of today's paper, David Sanger of the NY Times dismisses the importance of the memo Walter Pincus wrote about in yesterday's Washington Post. According to Sanger, the memo proves that the Bush administration was not dead set on invading Iraq and any "new" information about the lack of planning is not new at all, but rather old news and therefore unimportant. To the NY Times, it does not matter that this memo shows how the administration intended to invade months before they made the case or how they completely failed to plan for post-invasion chaos:


Yes, they published details of that plan. Simultaneously, though, they  published articles written by Judith Miller promoting the war with "evidence" she'd gathered in her long, hot, and sweaty "investigations" in Ahmed Chalabi's bedroom. It seems to me those were the last "investigative" articles the Times published on the war. Their cover article today about the problems of training Iraqi troops is so far behind Friday's Post article it's pathetic. The Times is becoming obsolete.

And then there's the Times' central argument that even though they didn't investigate the cooked intelligence and hyped lead up to the war at the time, and even though we now know we started the war on false pretenses (and lies, lies, lies), there's no need to revisit it because it's "spilled milk," as Jon Stewart called it when he interviewed Colin Powell. This insistence that it doesn't matter because we're already there is so unbelievably ignorant I hardly know what to say. What the hell is going on?!
 

After two short days in Kabul, S is back in Jalalabad. He called tonight to tell me that he won't be able to contact me for at least several days, maybe more. There is no cell phone service in the mountains and there's only one phone at the J-bad base for everyone to use, so the lines are intense. He'll be running missions again in the outlaying areas. Whenever I hear news from him, I'll post it here. Meanwhile, I'll worry about him.

I hate that the worry has become constant and "normal."