I've added a number of features to the site over the weekend:

• Yippee, we have a chat room!  The interface still seems to be a bit buggy - sometimes it won't load completely - but otherwise it appears to be working well. 
  
• I've upgraded the sites email feed, so those who wish to sign up for a daily email of all posts can use the the box on the right (Subscription Tools).  This is a significant improvement over the previous notifications.   Unfortunately, I still can't get it to send video links, so you'll have to visit the site directly for those.  I've also added an atom feed for those RSS snobs.
• I've upgraded the site's anti-spam measures which should make it easier to post legitimate comments.

Amidst all the white noise on the Iraq report, the blogosphere still appears to have found some time to shout a big ‘ah-ha’ on Mary Cheney’s pregnancy. See! She’s gay and a single mom! We surely gotcha now! Honestly, all this hooplah really gets to me. It’s annoying enough when the right-wing blogs bemoan the wretched stain on the Cheney family's good name, but it’s even worse when such malarkey comes from ordinarily progressive bloggers.

Aside from being a simpering little apologist for her dad’s administration, this girl has done nothing that we ourselves are not fighting for. Yes, she is gay. Yes, she will now be an “unwed” mother. But come on, in what stretch of the imagination does this somehow “win” an argument that Cheney – and right-wingers by extension – are all hypocrites? Our entire argument is that being gay is not a choice, so how is it possible that her dad could have had any influence over her sexuality? Besides, do we really need to manufacture another excuse to criticize right-wingers that we must exploit the private life of this woman whose only real fault is being the progeny of the Prince of Darkness?

We shouldn’t be gloating about this, we should feel sorry for Mary Cheney – she is about to be victimized even further by her father’s policies.

I originally posted this as a comment on a friend's MySpace blog who was posting the suicide note of Malachi Ritscher. This guy burned himself alive on a Chicago freeway in protest of the Iraq war. Almost four weeks ago and I'm just hearing of it now. His final words were one of the most touching farewells I have ever read.

I've been seeing a lot of sites, including the Chicago Sun-Times , trying to write him off as mentally ill. Yet Malachi's prose seems more sane and rational to me than anything I read in the paper. What's mentally ill is hearing the truth yet calling it a sickness.

As a race we like to feel so enlightened and superior. But we hate the truth, don't we? The truth is our enemy. The truth is a dangerous. The truth will unravel the tranquility of our fiction and we must squash it, trivialize it, kill it ... then seek out the truth in others and kill that too.

We need our lies. Because if we were to rid ourselves of our blissful, luxurious denial, then we would have to deal with the fact that we - all of us - are to blame. Humanity is our collective responsibility and we share, even if only passively, in every consequence of our collective decisions. All of us. We all snapped a picture and laughed while torturing our Iraq brothers at Abu Ghraib. We took turns beating unarmed civilians in Haditha when we thought nobody was watching. We went hunting with Cheney to celebrate the slaughter of an entire city from 60,000 feet. We played politics with the Schiavo family's personal tragedy to score cheap votes among a venomous constituency. And we threw a brick through Hazim Barakat’s Islamic bookstore because we didn’t like his brown skin.

We did this. None of us are innocent. If you pay taxes, if you drive on roads, if you go to public school, if you work anywhere in the financial system from which the beast feeds, then you are passively condoning the actions of our representatives in government. Every day that we wrap ourselves in denial, that we feel distance from the suffering on TV, that we succumb to the certainty of our own impotence - that is one more day we shroud ourselves in guilt.

My own lie is that I'm somehow less responsible, that since I've withdrawn financial support from the U.S. government I am absolved. But this is bullshit. And I know it. All I do to feel better, every petition I sign, every letter I write, every phone call I make is merely a fraction of my potential to effect change. Malachi had the courage of his convictions - he was selfish and stupid and brave. We don't need to follow his path, but we need to follow his example. All of us.

Today.

I'm reminded of the words spoken by another selfish and stupid and brave soul, Mario Savio, who also robbed us of his potential at too young an age:

There comes a time when the operation of the machine is so odious that you cannot even tacitly participate. You've got to place your bodies on the gears, the wheels, all the mechanism. You've got to indicate to those who own it and those who run it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

I'm afraid of the truth. I love my lies and I'm not ready to give them up, not even close. But I will not let Malachi's suffering be in vain. I will remember his courage and strive to do more with my own stupid little life. And I’ll end this rant with one final quote:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel unsure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. As we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.