Stateside With Rosalea: For crying out loud

Who remembers Leapy Lee and his annoying song, 'Little Arrows'? It goes: "Little arrows in your clothing, little arrows in your hair, when you're in love you'll find those little arrows everywhere." Well, Happy Valentine's day and all that, but the little arrows I'm thinking of are the ones someone drew on a 'New York Times' article from Sunday February 2, about the US build-up in the gulf.

The arrows point to the number of bombs the Air Force has stockpiled there, and my friend was pointing out how they represent more destructive power than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Get the picture? {ed - picture here, please don't crop it}

You can not begin to imagine what's going on here by way of resistance to the Bush administration. This morning, as I was walking to work my little radio picked up a rap station on which the DJ declared he was a "translator", speaking for the angels who were speaking to him, and he declared Bush to be the devil himself. All this was based on lyrics of a song by 50 Cent, which the DJ interpreted as he played it. The DJ said 50 also is the devil, of course, because that number represents the fallen angel. The radio station seems to have taken the DJ off the air now, half an hour later.

Last night on the train to my night class a big tear rolled down my cheek as I listened to Aurora Levins Morales read her poem about child victims of war. I think National Public Radio was airing poets because a group of them had refused to go to the White House to read poetry for Mrs. Bush. In the poem, from beyond the grave the child victims of war cry out:

"Don't just stand there; *your* heart is still beating."

So get out and march. And if you can't get out and march, grab a chessboard, place it in front of you, and place something precious on the bottom left hand square (the southwest, as in South West Asia aka the Middle East) and say ten times:

"Peace is a civil right."

Or if you're the praying kind, whatever your faith, there are some prayers and meditations at

http://www.womenforpeace.org/MusicPoetry.htm#Meditations

If the whole world could come to a standstill to mourn the attack on the World Trade Center, it can come to a standstill to create a pre-emptive peace.

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