I am not a political person in any sense. I don’t discusss politics as I find it a boring waste of time that polarizes us into camps of thinking, stripping away individual thought. I get passionate about issues, but I believe that real change isn’t going to happen at the highest level of government – rather, the lowest, most ignored levels right here in the neighborhood. I also believe a dissolution of the party system would be the cure to our political ills. If people were forced to vote based on a candidate’s actual beliefs and not on whatever party is backing him/her, we might actually make progress. And I don’t believe that our country tells us the full story, but only what they think we need to know.
Nowhere was this last notion validated more than in the blog Baghdad Burning, written by a woman in Iraq nicknamed Riverbend. She writes from the heart and from firsthand experience in a war-torn, American occupied country. Her insights and her accounts of what she’s seen, what’s happening in her neighborhood, and how the “victory” in Iraq is really playing out is mind-numbing. You will not read that blog and come away unchanged. You just can’t.
Thanks to Katharine for posting her concerns about Riverbend, who hasn’t blogged in a year. Katharine compared her to a modern-day Anne Frank in that she has shown us things we in our safe worlds cannot imagine happening. I couldn’t agree more.
Read her blog here. Then come back and tell me what you think.
This is a powerful blog. Thank you for introducing us to it. I have friends overseas living in utter uncertainty in the places she discusses in her post. But she manages to find something positive, even under the trying circumstances she describes. Du’a (prayers) for her family and everyone else who has been displaced.