April in California

Spring showers of activism in the Bay include:
--Working from the Global Exchange CODEPINK office on everything under the sun-rushing to coordinate and plan and email and talk on conference calls, a dive into the activist world with little preparation that I will later look back on as experiential learning to the nth degree-a wonderful and intense time.

--Actions against the Minutement, the vigilante group that raises trouble and fear on the border by declaring personal war on undocumented Mexican immigrants

--Tent University (read the post!)

--A Holistic Passover Seder at my parents' house with over 15 people, using a Haggadah focusing on peace and social justice that my mom and I co-edit together. A second night Seder at Anna's college with the Greenbergs and late night musings in Palo Alto.

During April, Marla Ruzicka dies in a car bomb explosion in Iraq. Though I never knew Marla personally, by the end of two weeks of memorials and altars and stories and testimonials, I feel as if I had known her somehow, or at least that I am in touch with her spirit. Eva visits after attending the funeral. Something about Marla's death brings home the real-ness of the war and the dangers of the innocents who get mixed up in the middle. And in Marla's death the innocent victims she dedicated her life to get some attention, but their deaths are not marked by the same attention, because they are Iraqi. I think she would have despised that aspect of the media coverage. Her nonpartisan pro-peace work raised a lot of questions in me about my own work and it seems that as time passes this continues to be an evolving spiritual dialogue. To read more about Marla's work and the continuing work of the organization she founded, CIVIC, visit www.civicworldwide.org.