Birthday, Birthing a New Congress

I celebrate my 24th birthday this year with a family and friends gathering at my cousin's house, amidst busy preparations for November 7th, the mid-term Congressional election. On Election Day, voters resoundingly renounce the Bush agenda in Iraq and vote in a Democrat majority in the House and Senate. On Election Day, Sam, Marie, Judy and I drive around all day getting out the vote, holding impromptu vigils, and at one point we are driving through strip malls and residential neighborhoods with Marie on the bull horn saying, "Give peace a vote! Fire Pombo! Quita Pombo!" It was a magnificent effort. One notable defeat was that Aimee Allison, a veteran of the Gulf War and a phenomenal woman who stands up for peace and justice, did not win a seat on the Oakland City Council.

Walk in Their Shoes: Tahoe Trip

CODEPINK started a powerful national visual expression against the war called Walk in Their Shoes: collections of men, women, and children's shoes each tagged with the name of an Iraqi civilian who has been killed in the war. The exhibit recalls the powerful imagery of the piles of shoes in Holocaust memorial museums, and the boots exhibit from the Quakers, called Eyes Wide Open.

We took the shoe display on the road to many small towns and cities throughout the Sierra foothills ~ Rep. Doolittle's district, to a rally where Laura Bush was speaking, and to Pombo's (now former!) district to to emphasize the need to vote for a peace candidate.

It was wonderful to connect with folks in every little town, and to feel the power of the shoe visual.

It is impossible to really imagine what it would be like to walk in the shoes of a person who has lost her entire family to murder, and painful to see long rows of shoes lined up, imagining what they would look like (or could have looked like) if so many (650,000) Iraqis weren't killed.

For more info about the Walk in Their Shoes exhibit, and to find out how to create your own, visit:
http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?list=type&type=176