Category Archives: Other Voices

I first wrote about Zeyad and his Healing Iraq weblog in early November.

It had been such a welcome change to get news of Iraq directly from someone who actually lived there, that I felt the future of real news gathering and dissemination lay with weblogs. As of today, I’m absolutely sure of it.

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I was seven years old when this news was broadcast on CBS:

We interrupt this programme to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air, President Roosevelt has just announced. The attack, also, was made on all naval and military activities on the principal island of Oahu.

I still remember feeling that my quiet world of listening to Sunday afternoon radio shows had come to an end. Something terrible was happening and our lives would be inexorably transformed in every detail. It was my first experience with a paradigm shift of great magnitude.

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Ironbear at Who Tends the Fires has written a thought-provoking essay on pacifism.

His central theme, “Pacifism is the ultimate abdication of personal responsibility,” managed to bring into view the underlying irrationality that always puzzled me about pacifism. I could never think with the concept of pacifism, so I simply discarded it as a viable solution to anything many years ago.

I failed to analyze pacifism in terms of what it meant in terms of taking responsibility for oneself and others. I should have.

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On a lighter note, Riverbend writes of her experience with the Martha Stewart of Baghdad.