WAKE-UP CALLS

New York blew me away. Each day was bigger, richer and more amazing than the one before – I felt like a constantly expanding balloon. Thank you to everyone who made La Casita unforgettable – organizers, artists, and most of all, audiences, at the Lincoln Center, Langston Hughes Library (Queens), The Point (Bronx), and La Plaza Cultural (East Village). Thank you to everyone on this list who sent me encouragement, celebration and support. Thank you to all the brave, beautiful people filling the streets of NY in the anti-RNC protests, putting their bodies on the line for peace and justice. And thank you to Max Café, at West 123rd St and Amsterdam, for a panna cotta that I still dream about.

I was lucky enough not to be arrested in NY. Thousands of other peaceful people, exercising what they believed to be their democratic rights, did not have the same good fortune. At the end of this mailing is an article, “Little Guantanamo” by the mother of one young woman arrested - she wasn’t even at a protest! Read it if you still cherish any illusions that Americans enjoy the right to due process. The writer holds political views far to the right of mine – she proudly displays American flags at her front gate and on her car window, and accepts without question that the real Guantanamo houses “Al Qaeda terrorist political prisoners”. Yet, her daughter’s experiences seem to have been a shocking wake-up call for her; and her article is a wake-up call for us all.

In community,

Shailja