springtime is for antiwar demonstrations

Today I met up with a bunch of my oldest Portland friends for the antiwar demonstration downtown. Many of us marched together this time three years ago right after the bombing in Iraq first began. We got t-shirts and painted "Social Workers Against Bombs" on them. S.W.A.B. -- nice. So, today we had a SWAB reunion. We all regreted that we didn't have our SWAB shirts anymore -- the sad reality, of course, is that we never anticipated we'd need them three years later. What the fuck?

Three years later?

Three years.

Anyone interested in hearing what it's like to actually be an Iraqi living in Baghdad should check out this blog, it's called Baghdad Burning and here's the URL: riverbendblog.blogspot.com -- it's awesome. Written by a young, educated woman who lives with her family in Baghdad. She basically just writes about her life, what's happening, basic blog-like things. But she's in Baghdad and her basic, blog-like things include describing how her family sat up, huddled together in the living room for hours, late into the night, as their neighborhood was raided -- the raiders (they didn't know who, maybe Iraqi police? Americans? Insurgents?) were working their way through, from house to house... so they just sat up waiting, prepared for the banging on the door and the armed men who would storm in, demanding, ordering, rifling, pilfering. Read this blog. It makes me almost ashamed to blog about the trivialities of my life.