What are we doing?!?

Sometimes there are days when I find it exquisitely hard to read the news. Most days, actually. But it feels like I have to, like it’s the least I can do, to remain aware of what the US is perpetrating around the world. The story that brings me to tears today is from a writer (Stephen Smith) who has a number of family members in Iraq, among them several doctors. He writes:

Four of my aunts and uncles are doctors in the main Hospitals in both Baghdad and Mosul. From contact with them, I can only imagine what it does to a doctor's heart to try to heal, knowingly in vain, a people who now may have become the first victims of irreparable, long-term geno-contamination in human history: Already at the Conference on Nuclear Arms in Hamburg, Oct. 2003, Dr. Katsuma Yagasaki, Prof. of Science at the University of Ryukyus, Okinawa, reported the US had dropped the equivalent of 250,000 times the radioactive nuclear waste dropped on Nagasaki in Iraq. Different from Nagasaki, however, the contamination in Iraq is widespread, dispersed over entire regions of the country, bullets, strewn casings, armor, fragments, shrapnel... all containing radioactive waste.

So what can we do? There HAS to be something. Prayer, of course. But what about active prayer? What about actions we can take to resist? One small act of resistance is to join in the "Not one red cent day" -- a boycott of all purchasing on January 20, 2005 (Bush's inaugural). Do your grocery shopping ahead of time, make sure you've got what you need, but DON'T buy a thing that day. If enough of us do it, perhaps we can register our combined power!