To clarify

Dear Ireland,

The green dress I am wearing today is solely because I like you (and because I celebrate any holiday I can get my hands on) and should in no way be construed as support for St. Patrick, that grove-chopping repticide.

Verdantly yours,
Julia Wise

The worth of a beating heart

It's so strange how different deaths have different impacts. Recently Tom Fox, a Quaker peace activist from the US, was found shot dead in Iraq where he and several other peace activists had been kidnapped some time ago. The Quaker community has been constantly keeping each other informed of his situation and now his death. It seems strange that a population so aware of the deaths of Iraqis and US troops alike would pay so much more attention to the death of one of our own. The Quakers are the last people I would expect to be exalting one person's death when they are (more than most populations) so aware of the costs of violence in our world. Is Tom Fox's life worth more than anyone else's?

In Richmond when the Harvey family was murdered and the city went into shock, I wanted to ask people why they weren't shocked that other people are killed in Richmond all the time, why the death of a rich white family was worse than the death of black children or adults in poor neighborhoods. But it's not as if it's wrong to be shocked at a murder. Sometimes I feel it's a mark of ignorance to take individual deaths personally, to be moved by them, since it implies that you're not considering all the wrongful deaths and sufferings that happen every day around the world. No one can consider and mourn them all or we'd never be able to function. But on the other hand, what are we if we take all tragedies in stride, if we let nothing affect us? Is that diminishing the worth of all lives, the meaning of tragedy? We may function better, but don't we lose something?

Sometimes Bryn Mawr students are a little too single-minded

I was reading that some Jewish families traditionally do a vegetarian meal for Purim, because the only way for Esther to have kept kosher while not letting on that she was a Jew would have been to not eat meat at all. I realize Purim doesn't start until tomorrow, but tonight was my night to cook so I did hummus and pita (surely they ate something similar in ancient Persia?) and hamentashen.

After I had set them out on the table a girl approached me with one, asking "And what are the beautiful . . . vagina cookies?" I replied something about them being hats, but I couldn't help wondering what kind of freaky triangular vaginas she was familiar with.

All's right with the world

It's raining, but I'm inside with a bowl of Cream of Wheat.

Relativity

It's good to have friends with a variety of political opinions, because the ones who seem crazy to you make you realize how crazy you seem to some of the others. I used to think that living in cooperatives and communes and things was wrong because if you're living on one you're not changing all the people in suburban isolation behind their picket fences. Ideally one should be a kind of missionary, talking one's neighbors into sharing lawnmowers and communal vegan dinners. But the older I get the more hopeless that seems to me (except for settlement houses, which some Jane Addams-wannabe part of me still loves). And I've started looking at co-ops to move into after Peace Corps, becase at this point I'm ready to admit that I can't change everything and on some fronts it's okay to eat my vegan meals in peace and try not to make the situation outside worse.

I swore it would never happen, but I'm starting to feel like the realist. Maybe it's just coincidence, but three conversations I've had with friends in the past 48 hours make me want to yell, "Do you have anything we could try now? Do you have any theories that don't require the overthrow of capitalism, the mechanization of all labor, the demilitarization of the country, the colonization of the moon, or the word 'hence'?!"

No, you're just angry and young

I finally saw someone wearing the "Angry Young and Poor" sweatshirt that Delia's used to sell. For, if I remember, $28. I wanted to laugh in her face, but possibly she got it secondhand.