In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

—Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872-1918), published 1915

(I feel I should note that I agree with Paul Fussell’s criticism, mentioned on the poem’s Wikipedia page (linked above), that the third stanza is problematic and doesn’t quite seem to fit with the first two.  Still, the poem has attained a significance for this holiday that seems to transcend its arguable literary or political merits, so I thought I’d post it all the same.)

To begin with, for the record, here is the pertinent section of the Stupak-Pitts amendment:

SEC. 265. LIMITATION ON ABORTION FUNDING.

(a) IN GENERAL—No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.

People who believe that women might have valid reasons to seek an abortion outside of danger of death, rape, or incest, and who understand that many women, should they find themselves in a position where they need or want to terminate a pregnancy, would need that procedure covered by insurance that is funded, entirely or in part, by the government, find this amendment unsettling, to say the least. (See Ann, Jill, and Shark-Fu’s takes.) The idea that the amendment will probably get removed in committee? Not particularly reassuring. The idea that the amendment is only talking about induced abortion, and couldn’t possibly be used to refuse coverage of an elective D&C to remove an incomplete abortion (as in, after a miscarriage, also known medically as a spontaneous abortion)? Yeah, that one’s also not particularly reassuring. The idea that this is not a big deal, it’s just politics, we have to look at the bigger picture? That’s not reassuring, and it’s patronizing! Whee!

I found this passage from the above-linked Daily Kos diary particularly illuminating:

About five minutes after the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, the anti-abortion forces began a war on the rights confirmed by that decision. But their molester-enabling, coathanger-selling, health-shattering, woman-hating, forced-pregnancy campaign was two-pronged, a direct assault but also an asymmetrical war, a nibble here, a nibble there.

And at every step of the way, some people who claimed they were pro-choice said that this little nibble or that little nibble wasn’t such a big deal. It only affected a small group of people or it was only the case rarely, we were told. The activists who challenged these nibbles were characterized as “hypersensitive,” “irrational,” and “over-reacting.” Not by their enemies. But by their supposed allies.

Over the decades, while engaging in a campaign of intimidation, harassment and murder, the anti-abortion movement has managed, nibble by nibble, to get ever-more restrictive legislation into place. Ultimately, the right of affluent women to obtain an abortion hasn’t been much affected – except in the case of late-term procedures. But affluent women always had options even when abortion was illegal in every state. They could fly to Puerto Rico or Japan and get a safe abortion there without having to risk potentially lethal chemicals or abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors or other providers operating on somebody’s kitchen table in less than sterile conditions.

Thanks to [the Hyde Amendment], low-income women in most states are still at a disadvantage when it comes to getting an abortion. Stupak-Pitts, if it survives the conference process, will not only reinforce this classist attack on women, it will also broaden it.

Being ferociously opposed to it is, therefore, not irrational or hypersensitive or over-reactive. It’s called standing up for progressive values.

Shark-Fu, Ann, and Jill suggest some actions we can take in the posts I linked above; I recommend checking those out.

(On an only tangentially-related note, I know I shouldn’t expect anything more from Dick Armey, but seriously, what the hell?)

Song of One of the Girls

Here in my heart I am Helen;
I’m Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I’m Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Stael;
I’m Salome, moon of the East.

Here in my soul I am Sappho;
Lady Hamilton am I, as well.
In me Recamier vies with Kitty O’Shea,
With Dido, and Eve, and poor Nell.

I’m of the glamorous ladies
At whose beckoning history shook.
But you are a man, and see only my pan,
So I stay at home with a book.

—Dorothy Parker

By a narrow margin, Maine voters have rejected the legislature’s decision to allow same-sex couples to marry in that state.  I’m heartbroken, I’m frustrated, and to be honest, I’m confused.  I have heard the arguments against legalizing same-sex marriage, and while I suppose I understand them on an intellectual level, on a gut-deep, visceral level?  They’re truly beyond me. It seems like the arguments I’ve heard can be grouped into three rough categories:

Religion: “My religion says that homosexuality is wrong and that marriage is between one man and one woman (Old Testament heroes notwithstanding), so I don’t think it should be legal.”  I can’t argue with that.  Your religious beliefs are your religious beliefs, and while I vehemently disagree, odds are pretty good that nothing I can say will change your mind, especially if the plight of families that don’t get to be treated as “real” families has left you unmoved.  But why should that make for a legitimate legislative argument?  My understanding is that, for an example, hard-line Catholics don’t recognize marriages performed by someone other than a priest in a location other than a church, and you can’t get married in a (hard-line) Catholic church unless you’re Catholic, and second marriages (preceded by divorce) aren’t viewed as legitimate, and so on – but nobody’s out there trying to make the argument that the hard-line Catholic version of marriage should be codified in secular law, and even if someone were, it wouldn’t fly.  Why does that change when the approach is more ecumenical?  Since a variety of religious faiths endorse some version of tithing (giving a tenth of one’s income to the church or to charity), why isn’t that something we could try to put into law?  What is it about gay rights that makes it okay to try to blur the lines between religious rules and secular law?

Discomfort: “I’m just not comfortable with the idea of two people of the same sex getting married.”  And so you want to make it illegal?  Eating bivalves makes gives me a great deal of intenstinal discomfort, but I’m not about to try to outlaw clam chowder.  WTF kind of sense does it make that “gay sex gives me the squickies” is somehow a legitimate reason for denying people rights?

Linguistics: “Gay rights activists are asking for too much.  If you just called them civil unions, but those unions had all the same rights as marriage, wouldn’t that be enough?  Why do you have to call it marriage?”  Honestly?  I’d think I’d probably be all for this if it applied to straight people, too, if what the county courthouse issued to two people, regardless of sex or gender, was a civil union license, with all the rights and benefits of what we now call marriage, and then if you want to go get married in a church and call your union a marriage, you’re welcome to, but you don’t have to, and no church is obligated to marry any particular couple.  Seems like it could be a reasonable compromise, no?

Two problems, though: a) no one opposing same-sex marriage has made a legislative proposal anything like that, and people who say “but wouldn’t civil unions be enough?” seem not to notice that people from the first two categories tend to vote down civil unions as well.  (Though it looks like Washington’s Referendum 71, which allows same-sex couples to register as domestic partners and “expand[s] the rights, responsibilities, and obligations of registered domestic partners and their families to include all rights, responsibilities, and obligations granted by or imposed by state law on married couples and their families,” squeaked by; is the ~4% difference in voters between Washington and Maine entirely attributable to the difference in language?)

And b) call me a cynic, but I would expect a knee-jerk negative response to my above proposal from straight folks, because it calls their privilege into question.  Civil marriage in the US has always been called marriage, and apparently “but it’s always been this way” is a compelling argument.  (I suppose that’s a fourth category: Tradition: “But it’s always been this way!”  I should think that the fact that I self-identify as a progressive would say all that needs to be said about how I feel about that particular argument.)  The other option, then, is to have straight couples get married and gay couples get civil-unioned.  But really, have we genuinely not yet learned that “separate but equal” is Constitutionally problematic?

Same-sex marriage has been legal in Massachusetts for five years now.  The state has not broken off and sunk into the Atlantic.  Christianity has not been outlawed.  People are not being marched at bayonet-point to the altar to marry someone of the same sex.  The institution of marriage has not collapsed in upon itself.  So what’s the problem, Mainers?  My impression was always that Maine was very much a live-and-let-live state; what happened?

[As always, Pam has a much better response than I do; she makes me feel hopeful again.  I appreciate what Alvin had to say, as well.]

On Wednesday Inupiaq poet Joan Kane received a $50,000 Whiting Writers’ Award (news story; hat tip) — very cool!

Anchorage

How rapidly the tide turned, turns.
Still, turning now, gray wash and silt
Pivots on a finger of foam.

One could count time in its long
Trough, or lose it altogether:

Winter may thicken the air
Earlier than expected.  Or,

An inflection in the shadow
Of the long crest is an increment,
And a small variation.

With it, we are joined, and continue.
A sharp-shinned hawk now wheels

Overhead, as each spring tends,
And shows its white underbelly.

—Joan Kane, 2006

I haven’t spoken in this particular venue on the subject of Roman Polanski, largely because others have said what I think so well already.  Furthermore, I find myself wondering, partly, what’s left to discuss?  A 44-year-old man in a position of power drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl.  There was a shitty plea bargain and some legal shenanigans, and the man served a little time, but fled the country to avoid serving any more, and has lived in Europe ever since.  The fact remains, though, that he raped a 13-year-old girl, and justice was arguably not served on that point.  Now he’s been re-apprehended, and what I’ve simply been dumbfounded by is the pundits and celebrities who want to discuss not whether the re-apprehension itself was shady, not the aforementioned legal shenanigans and/or the problematic nature of plea bargains, not whether California’s limited resources might be better spent on other things—but whether or not what Polanski did was really rape and/or was justifiable.

This week, William Saletan made a foray into the rape apologism surrounding the Polanski case.  Now, I know that Saletan has given feminists every reason to ignore what he says outright, but I stumbled upon this round of garbage via a Think Progress e-mail and it incensed me enough that I had to write about it. 

A bit of personal background: I started menstruating when I was ten years old.  It was toward the end of my fifth grade year; thankfully, we’d already had enough sex ed that I understood what was happening.

I hit my full adult height when I was twelve years old, in seventh grade.  I was still gawky as hell, believe you me, but I had hips, I wore a bra, and I was, at least in theory, physically capable of bearing a child.  However, I was not at all ready to be having sex, especially not with someone decades older than me.

Saletan, however, appears to be arguing that I would therefore have been fair game, at least to a certain extent, at the age of twelve:

Why exactly should we be aghast that the legal system of the 1970s considered such evidence relevant to Polanski’s culpability? Why aren’t the physical maturity and willingness of the girl—or boy—significant?

In fact, they are. As I’ve pointed out before, over the past 150 years in the United States and Europe, the average age of menarche—a girl’s first period—has fallen two to four months per decade, depending on the country. In 1840, the age was 15.3 years. By the early 1980s, it was 12.8. It’s quite plausible that the 13-year-old girl Polanski had sex with in the late 1970s was, to some degree, sexually mature.

Having sex at 13 is a bad idea. But if you’re pubescent, it might be, in part, your bad idea. Having sex with a 13-year-old, when you’re 40, is scummy. (Personally, I’d be stricter. If I ran a college, I’d discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen.) But it doesn’t necessarily make you the kind of predator who has to be locked up. A guy who goes after 5-year-old girls is deeply pathological. A guy who goes after a womanly body that happens to be 13 years old is failing to regulate a natural attraction. That doesn’t excuse him. But it does justify treating him differently.

If I’m to be generous (has Saletan given me any reason to be generous?), Saletan is basically just making the argument that it is neither fair nor accurate to call Polanski – or any adult who has sex with a girl who has passed menarche – a pedophile.  Which, okay, if we’re talking solely about linguistics and labels, I suppose we can generally say that there’s a difference between someone who’s sexually attracted to prepubescent children and someone who’s sexually attracted to pubescent and postpubescent (is that a word?) teenagers*.  But is that really the lesson we should be taking away from the Polanski case?  Is that the discussion we need to be having?

In a follow-up post, Saletan states that “we shouldn’t contort our justice system to nail this or that defendant. The distinctions we draw or fail to draw in our laws endure from case to case. We have to get them right,” and that prepubescent children “aren’t 13- or 15-year-olds, for whom an argument about willingness can at least be made.”  He goes on to complain about “the conflation of sexual assault defined by force with sexual assault defined by age.”

At this point, he’s sounding an awful lot like concern trolls of the rape apologist variety, who frequently claim that if we want “real rape” to be taken seriously, then we have to stop getting our knickers in a twist over “gray-area rape,” defined variously as sex with a willing person below the age of consent, sex with someone who is intoxicated or asleep, sex with someone who had previously consented but changed their mind, sex with a non-consenting spouse, etc.

Another follow-up post went up this morning, in which on the one hand Saletan seems to be taking issue with the shitty plea bargain—“I can understand the desire of prosecutors and the public to nail him for something. But I don’t like using rape defined by age as a proxy for rape defined by coercion”—which, okay, reasonable people can argue about plea bargains and whether X should be considered an acceptable substitute for Y charge—but on the other hand we’re back to the idea that a young woman who is past menarche but still well under the age of consent is fair game: “Is maturity an arguable factor with a 13-year-old, particularly one who’s posing nude in a jacuzzi? Yes.”

I have to tell you, I’m not real sympathetic to the idea that there are mitigating factors in terms of someone’s culpability insofar as committing rape is concerned, and the comment about posing nude in a jacuzzi sounds an awful lot like blaming the victim, to me.

Ultimately, age-of-consent laws exist for a reason.  Sometimes they’re used to trample on the sexual autonomy of teenagers, and that’s problematic, but ultimately I’m not at all willing to say that physical sexual maturity should dictate a person’s age of consent.  And is a discussing the Roman Polanski case seriously the best place to discuss such things?  Seriously?

I don’t know anything about Saletan’s personal life, but I really, really, really hope he doesn’t have any daughters.

*From Wikipedia, via commenter Evelyn Morgan in the Slate discussion forum: a pedophile is someone attracted to prepubescent youths.  A hebephile is someone attracted to pubescent youths.  An ephebophile prefers youths in older adolescence, while a teleiophile’s interest is in adults.  So there we are, then.

Freeper, on the subject of Mary Cheney and Heather Poe expecting their second child:

The example of Murphy Brown should not be practiced by those who propose to defend Family values.

Hey there, Mr. or Ms. Freeper!  I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but the season in which Murphy Brown — a fictional character, I feel I should point out — became a single mother happened almost twenty years ago.  You might want to try out this newfangled thing called getting the fuck over it.

I s’pose I might as well be talking to my shoes on that point, though, no?

(Yes, I’m way more entertained than I have any reason to be by finding a way to title each blog entry this week with “I support…”  Alternate titles for this post are “Thoughts on Banned Books Week” (*yawn*) and “Fear of a Gay Penguin,” which of course I keep accidentally mis-typing as “Fear of a Black Penguin,” though that works, too, I suppose…)

Here we are again: Banned Books Week.  I support the goals of this week as traditionally stated, because I’m a big fan of the First Amendment, and I think more often than not people challenge books not because those books would truly be damaging to children/adolescents or the general public, but because they make them uncomfortable in some way.  It’s intolerance, or it’s fear.  I love the way commenter adipocere over at MetaFilter put it:

I love the thought processes behind banned books. “I find this offensive; I want you to remove this from my reality and everyone else’s.” It’s at once passive and blustery. MY FEATHERS ARE ALL PUFFED OUT; DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

That said, though, it seems like the momentum for Banned Books Week isn’t there this year the way it’s been in past years.  And I think, maybe that’s just me, I’ve been sick, I’ve been travelling, I’m tired — but then I see it reflected elsewhere on the web.  On the one hand we have articles like this one from the Wall Street Journal: Finding Censorship Where There Is None.  The author seems to be asserting that having books removed from libraries isn’t such a big deal ’cause people can just buy the books they want, easy peasy, and librarians are the ones who are afraid of discourse while the people who object to books are the ones whose freedom of speech/expression is being threatened.

Mmm-hmm.

Neil Gaiman responds to that some here, and points to a good rebuttal to the idea that Banned Books Week is no longer necessary here.  In a nutshell, there’s this: people are literally threatening to burn books now, today, in 2009.  That’s a problem that ought to be addressed, no?

On the other hand there are pieces like the blog post Jessamyn at librarian.net put up, and her commentary on the aforementioned MetaFilter thread.  In the latter, she points out that the term “Banned Books Week” is misleading:

Haivng [sic] a book removed from a local or school library, while crappy, does not in any way equate with a governmental organization saying “no one should read this book; it’s not okay to read this book” I feel bad about this every year, but realistically speaking, they stuck with BBW because it’s a brand and it’s edgy/catchy, not because it’s accurate.

And then she gets into other problems with BBW:

This is actually a debated topic in the larger library community nearly every year when this comes up. BBW is a big deal in the library community but the culture has really changed so that the lion’s share of the books that have even been challenged are books in school libraries that parents feel aren’t age appropriate. Now, I still think that asking for a book to be removed from the library because you think no child of the age group of the school should be reading it isn’t cool, but it’s really different from saying “No one should read ____________ because it contains harmful ideas” which is what people are trying to sort of evoke when they talk about Tropic of Cancer and other books that were really more in the “forbidden/illegal” realm.

Usually what people are challenging is Harry Potter. Nearly every challenged book [that becomes public, i.e. where the librarian submitted the information about the challenge to the ALA] is not even removed from the library. These are books on hot button topics (witchcraft, gay penguins, slavery, teen pregnancy) that certain specific well-funded groups, in most cases, are trying to push the envelope on. I feel that it would be more useful to expose these groups who rile people up and get great media attention with these stunts and ask “what’s harmful about swearing?” “Why shouldn’t kids learn about drug use?” “Why do we think people learning about things is somehow the same as advocating that they do that?”

The whole thing is so blitely [sic] shallow. I think if we really want to make a point, we should be saying “intellectual freedom is good because ____________” and not just saying “OMG someone tried to ban Harry Potter, therefore they are bad, we are good and let’s all read in our wizard hats and celebrate our freedom to buy things!” For the most part, it’s a shopping holiday when it’s not being celebrated in libraries and even the ALA would like you to buy bookmarks and posters about it. I’d like to see some real research about reading habits and how what you read does or does not affect you and why limiting people’s access to information is BAD FOR SOCIETY and who, exactly, is trying to do this. We know these things. We have the data, but all we do is read 1984 to a bunch of nodding do-gooders and I don’t think that’s really solving the problem that is leading people to challenge books in the first place.

It’s hard not to agree with that.  She gets at the heart of the matter a bit more succinctly in the post at librarian.net:

[I]f we want to get serious, I think we need to hit these points directly and ask people why they’re afraid of sex, or gay people (or penguins), or swearing. It’s nice to say that “free people read freely” but it’s another to be in a situation where your institutions are getting pressured by people who are intolerant and thinking that speaking truth to power is all you need to do.

That is something that’s very much worth thinking about.

In closing, Neil Gaiman also linked today to this blog post from July of 2008, in which a librarian responded to a patron’s objection to a picture book called Uncle Bobby’s Wedding.  It’s an excellent and well-reasoned response, and it makes it clear to me that people who object to particular books shouldn’t be overly concerned that their freedom of speech/expression is being trampled on (unless that was, perhaps, not what they were truly concerned about in the first place…).  Here is an excerpt from the conclusion:

Finally, then, I conclude that “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” is a children’s book, appropriately categorized and shelved in our children’s picture book area. I fully appreciate that you, and some of your friends, strongly disagree with its viewpoint. But if the library is doing its job, there are lots of books in our collection that people won’t agree with; there are certainly many that I object to. Library collections don’t imply endorsement; they imply access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life.

Have I mentioned recently how much I love libraries and reading and the First Amendment?

A pet peeve of mine is people calling undocumented immigrants “illegals.”  It’s dehumanizing.  Naturally, then, I appreciated this passage from a recent Crooks and Liars post, which goes into more detail on that point, and makes enough really good points that I wanted to reproduce it here in hopes of contributing just a little bit toward making the discussion a bit more… dare I say civil?… and grounded in reality.  The excerpt is fairly long, so I’m putting it below the fold.

There’s a reason the National Association of Hispanic Journalists urges their colleagues to avoid dehumanizing terms like “illegals”:

The term criminalizes the person rather than the actual act of illegally entering or residing in the United States without federal documents. Terms such as illegal alien or illegal immigrant can often be used pejoratively in common parlance and can pack a powerful emotional wallop for those on the receiving end.

Moreover, as Eric Haas at the Rockridge Institute points out, it’s a grossly misleading phrase — and one that reveals a powerful xenophobia:

But the phrase “illegal immigrant” is misleading. There’s a grain of truth, but the emphasis is only selectively applied — it’s misapplied — we don’t call speeders “illegal drivers” or people who jaywalk “illegals.” And that selective application to immigrants is harmful.

Most people don’t understand that “illegal immigration” is in fact only a civil misdemeanor — which, as legal infractions go, places it on the same scale as speeding or illegal parking. Instead, we’ve managed to work it up in our minds that being undocumented in the United States is a big-time crime, and thus the undocumented are criminals.

Thus we get Rep. Steve King saying this in response to the Democrats’ common-sense efforts:

“If anybody can, with a straight face, advocate that we should provide health insurance for people who broke into our country, broke our law and for the most part are criminals, I don’t know where they ever would draw the line,” he said.

I wonder if Steve King has ever exceeded the speed limit while driving on the freeway. Because, applying his own logic, he would himself also be “a criminal.”

Moreover, nearly half of the undocumented workers in this country didn’t “break into” the country — they came here on legal visas that then expired, and they simply didn’t leave.

Calling them “illegals” and “illegal immigrants” is a noxiously dehumanizing habit — one that only encourages hatefulness and violence against Latinos. It would always help, as Marisa Trevino at Latina Lista points out, if President Obama himself would stop using it.

Because the logic of “illegals” eventually leads to a mindset like that noted by Albor Ruiz at the New York Daily News, describing the kind of commentary that usually accompanies discussions of immigration:

“Save the taxpayers of this country a great deal of money and kill them [the undocumented immigrants] on the spot, along with those who think [they] deserve anything better,” he said as a reaction to “Immigration’s self-deportation program is a real government gem,” a column that ran in this space on Aug. 6.

Ironically, the writer used the case of an illegal immigrant who committed murder in Texas to justify calling – patriotically, I guess – for a much more horrible crime, an “ethnic cleansing” of sorts against all immigrants and – why stop there? – thousands of people “who think these pieces of (I’ll spare the reader the disgusting epithet) deserve anything better.” If this guy and others like him had their choice, I and others like me would be well advised to “go back to where we came from.” Or else.

That, of course, is classic eliminationism. It underlies the use of “illegals.” And that alone is reason for major-network TV anchors to stop using it.

A friend of mine has a bumper sticker on her car that says, “I support democracy in Iran.”  Now, obviously I agree with that statement, and I understand her motivations for putting the sticker there.  However, sometimes the trouble with bumper stickers and bumper sticker-style statements is that they can come of as sounding exclusionary.  “I support democracy in Iran” — but what about, say, Honduras, or Taiwan, or Liberia?  I think it’s safe to say that my friend supports democracy in other countries as well, but I can’t help but be reminded of the media coverage of the Iran election and fallout versus the media coverage of election- or democracy-related unrest and violence in other countries.  As other bloggers before me have discussed, it strikes me as problematic.

I thought of the Iran coverage yesterday when I came across an AP article discussing pro-democracy protests in Guinea:

CONAKRY, Guinea – Guinea’s government said Tuesday it would investigate why troops opened fire on protesters at a pro-democracy rally. A human rights group said 157 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured.

While saying it would investigate, the government continued to maintain that the protest was illegal. It also said far fewer people died than reported.

Hospitals were flooded with patients Tuesday, and the death toll rose through the day.

Presidential guard troops fired on 50,000 people at the main football stadium Monday, shattering hopes that this West African country was shedding the yoke of dictatorship.

Some of those at the rally, upset that a military officer who seized power in a December coup might run for president in January elections, had chanted: “We want true democracy.”

I don’t watch much TV news, particularly since right now we don’t have MSNBC, otherwise I would no doubt be watching Keith Olbermann’s and Rachel Maddow’s shows on a regular basis.  That was true in June, too, though, and I still heard tons about the post-election unrest in Iran.  As far as I can tell, people aren’t talking about the unrest in Guinea the same way, and I can’t help but wonder why not.  I don’t have any firm thoughts on the matter, just vague ideas, the bulk of which were already covered in the Feministe link above.  At any rate, though, I wanted to call attention to this story, and state that my thoughts are with the pro-democracy protestors in Guinea, along with others around the world who are struggling to create or maintain governments of, for, and by the people.