Saturday, August 20, 2005
Friday Baja Blogging, on a Saturday Here's a Baja photo one day late. I talked to Selma, and Fred is finally home from the hospital. How wonderful! He's feeling great, though tired. I'm so happy he's home. Over three weeks. Horrible. Hopefully he will be well enough by New Year's to go to Baja, where we will celebrate the new year together with cheap Trader Joe's wine, ripe mangoes, and lush mole.  This person lives near my old apartment here in New Orleans. I have parked behind their SUV countless times. Maple Street Book Shop is an independent, small bookstore in Uptown near Tulane. You see their "Fight the Stupids" stickers everywhere, but this is the only one I've seen that has it next to a "W The President" sticker. And with no apparent sense of irony, no less! The "I Care" sticker is one that the city put out in their on-going attempt to advertize how much they care about the problems in this city without having to actually do anything about them. The sticker matters most, I guess. If you say "I care" does that mean you actually do? In our crazy Bush World, yes. "Mission accomplished," "compassionate conservative," blah blah blah. Perhaps he learned how to bleed words of their meaning at one of his many fundraisers down here in the Big Easy. Cindy Sheehan has had to leave Camp Casey in Crawford to care for her mother who has had a stroke, but grieving parents continue to go there and as she said in her most recent note, the Camp Casey Peace Movement has a life of its own separate from her, and no amount of crazy conspiracy theories made up by Rush, or badmouthing by Matt Drudge, can stop it. Here's an excerpt of her most recent post: Some Gold Star Moms from Oregon joined me today and another from
California. Another mom whose son was killed this past February arrived
last night. Then we had a Gold Star Dad whose son had died this past
June 15th show up at Camp Casey today with his family. Ruben said he
just came to give me a hug. He said until today he had felt so lonely.
Every time I meet a Gold Star parent whose son died after Casey, I feel
so badly. I have been struggling for months to call attention to this
mistake of a war to end it sooner. Every new death is like a stab in my
heart.
I'm staying with two close friends here, Margarita and her fiance Neza. Margarita is from Cuernavaca, Mexico and is studying to take her comprehensive exams next month at Tulane (she's getting her PhD in Latin American Studies). She told me about Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group of mothers of the disappeared in Argentina who, one by one, camped out in the middle of the town square to demand answers from their government during the height of the dictatorship there. The totalitarian regime thought that if the bodies were never found, they could keep the reality of the disappearances from the bulk of the country by denying that the disappeared ever existed at all, not unlike our government shielding us from pictures of arriving coffins, or Rush's newest claim that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey never existed. Will Rush insist that every Gold Star family member is a fraud? It's impossible! There are too many, and sadly, more join their sorrowful ranks every day. Las Madres de Mayo confronted the government and made the rest of the country acknowledge their loss. They were the truthtellers, the unquestionable demonstrators of reality, and they forced Argentinians to accept what was being done in their name. Cindy Sheehan is not a madre de Mayo, she is a madre de Western White House, but her power is the same. The tide has turned. More and more will continue to speak out and no amount of crap from the chickenhawk right will stop them or silence them. I will try to write again tomorrow, either a last post from Fair Grinds, or a late-night post from a motel on the Mississippi outskirts of Memphis. On Monday I am going to the Civil Rights Museum before heading north. I'm going to call them and make sure they are open. I can't miss it again. 
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Last update: 9/1/05; 10:09:05 AM .
