brethren priestess online

If you like Harry Potter and progressive politics, this memorial to Karl Rove’s stint running our country is for you:

For those who like blogs and don’t like Bush:

The facial tics and jumbled verbiage of this actor are uncannily realistic. The truth of it is scary.

Voice of the People
Chicago Tribune

Re: Virginia Tech Tragedy

Dear Voice of the People,

We all mourn for the students senselessly massacred at Virginia Tech.
But where is the mourning for the American soldiers of similar age, a
similar number of whom are killed every week in Iraq? The Bush regime
even refuses to allow photographs of the caskets of American soldiers
who sacrificed their lives. The Virginia tragedy was a freakish event
that could not have been predicted. In contrast, we know with
certainty that dozens of Americans and hundreds of Iraqis will die
every month as long as Bush’s War continues. The American people have
spoken clearly and demand an end to the Iraq Disaster. Let us fly our
flags at half-mast until Congress does its job and shuts down the Iraq
War. If this means impeaching Bush (for lying to Congress to get the
war approved, for advocating torture, and for refusing to act on a
Congressional mandate to stop the war), so much the better.

Much can and should be said about the sadness of the violence at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg this week, but what I would say is to share my sadness and fear about my own mortality as a student. Schools should be safe places, as our Commander in Chief stated this week. Many/most/all places on Earth should be.

But schools fill a particular purpose in society, which makes the murders there all the harder to bear. Schools are the places where we go to develop ourselves in order to go into the world, to make a difference in our futures, and the students killed this week never got that chance. Their lives ended while they were just learning who they were to be in the world, before they got to use all they had been learning to become.

The lives of these victims, however long or short, were full, and blessings to the world. And death is not, inherently, evil; in fact, death should be a blessed part of the experience of life. But when death is perverted to take away the blessings of life, before their time, be it in war or in campus massacres, it is our Christian and human duty to rage against this violence. And rage starts with the deep knowing of mind-and-heart-felt mourning.