this i believe

Maybe this is the cheater's way to blog, just posting links to other things that I find provocative and interesting. And maybe I think there's too much good stuff out there to sift through, and I hope that by posting these links I'm helping you just a teeny bit to muddle through the internet's constant threat of information overload and actually find and read some informative stuff. Maybe both. Anyway, I like it when far better writers than I are able to articulate exactly how I'm feeling. For example, I wish I could have written this, because boy do I believe it:

"For many of us, feminism is not separate from the struggle against violence, war, racism and economic injustice. Gender hierarchy and race hierarchy are not separate and parallel dynamics. The empowerment of women is contingent upon all these things. Despite the fact that we know that identity does not equal politics--especially an antiwar, social equity and global justice politics--we are led to believe that having a woman in power is the penultimate accomplishment. And even when the "either/or" [as in, either you're with us... and believe a woman - any woman - should be President or you're against us] feminists back off this claim in general, we are told, it is true in the case of the particular, Hillary Clinton. Experience and judgment go hand in hand, we are told, but one has to wonder how is it that so many ordinary citizens who were outside the beltway instinctively sensed what would come with the war, but the female candidate running for President did not?"

For us, the choice at hand is actually quite simple. It is not about the woman candidate vs. the Black male candidate. It is about the candidate who works to dismantle the bomb, rather than drop it; the candidate who works to abolish the old paradigm of power, rather than covet and rise to its highest point; the candidate who seeks solutions and dialogue rather than retaliation and punishment."