Current Events

A Prisoner’s Anniversary: ‘Ignite the Light’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

At heart, it is a love story. Love of truth. Love of fairness, of justice. The love of a young couple with young children. Love is optimism, you see. Love can build a world that has truth and fairness in it.

Building a family is perhaps the most optimistic act possible; fighting for a better country and world demands vigilance in the name of that optimism.

One year ago today a young writer, activist, husband, and dad was given a court’s sentence: 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes with a cane or a whip, to be delivered in a public square in sets of 50 each Friday until the 1000 have been delivered. So far one set of 50 was meted out, on January 9. He has been in a small prison cell for almost 1100 days now, 1077 today if my count is correct.

A great many activists have been writing, blogging, making phone calls, standing outside embassies each Friday—a great many are standing outside embassies today in honor of the sad anniversary—asking powerful people to speak to other powerful people to right what they feel is a great wrong. It is a love story, but the ending still appears to be far, far distant.
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Hating Hate

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I detest Pamela Geller and I expect that she spent her Monday morning traveling from news appearance to news appearance chortling over her seemingly successful baiting last night of a couple of insane gun-toters who apparently were going to use a particular religion as justification to shoot up an event she had created for just the purpose of baiting any and all insane gun-toters who might want to use that particular religion as justification for violence. I detest her and all she claims to stand for.
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Flipping and Flopping, Wishing and Washing

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If you are interested in the horse-race nature of American politics, the drop-everything-every-four-years-so-we-can-fill-all-the-jobs-in-Washington-DC portion of our public life, you could do no worse than live in either New Hampshire or Iowa for the entire year before Election Day. This means that right now is a good time to move to Nashua, New Hampshire, or Des Moines, Iowa, if you are a politics addict.

The reasons for this are obscure and boring, unless you live in either state. In that case you might be passionate about your community’s role in selecting our next President. It might be the one thing you care about, and you might care about it more than the name of the person who will get your vote.
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