Go. Read. Now.

The following is an excerpt from Anne Lamott's excellent and thoughtful piece on Salon yesterday, Let's Have a Revolution! Does July 14 Work for You?"

I urge you to go read the whole thing, but at the very least read the excerpts below. She makes so much sense, and so much in this world just does NOT these days.

...maybe there is the chance of a calm, polite revolution, and perhaps in lieu of "divine love" we could use the idea of simple "kindness." Consider, just for the sake of argument, how good people, in a democracy that has been taken over by cold, rich, scary, armed white men, might proceed.

Good people who have watched their country's leaders skid so far to the triumphal right would have to do something. I mean, wouldn't they? Am I crazy? Otherwise, those people's children will ask them someday, when we are all living in caves, "What did you do to try and save us?" And the children will be so angry, and they are so awful and unpleasant when they are mad, even in the dark.

I, for one, do not want to answer that I did nothing, or that I ranted and flailed, showing up to support my own interest groups, candidates and concerns.

Instead, I think we should lay down our differences, and have a revolution....


We will just all come together. Bastille Day. Ix-nay on the cellphones and the speeches. Like Woody Allen said once before I turned on him, 80 percent of life is just showing up. We will show up and foment a loving revolution:... I just looked up "foment," to make sure that this is what I meant. It comes from the Latin "fomentum," which means a warm poultice. One of the definitions is to apply a warm cloth, dipped in warm water or medication, to a body that needs healing; and that is exactly what I meant.

I'm thinking noon-ish.

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In kind of related news, I was so pleased and relieved to turn on my computer this morning and see that Jill Carroll, the freelance journalist for the Christian Science Monitor who was kidnapped in Iraq three months ago, has been released.