'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

BLOGGING AS FIVE-FINGER EXERCISES: For

BLOGGING AS FIVE-FINGER EXERCISES: For some reason, two of my sisters have both expressed a concern that my blogging "might be taking too much of my time". (All three of my sisters live on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, in England. Sometimes I wonder how much they talk about me behind my [very distant] back, as it were. I don't spend much time speculating about it though, because-- well, you know-- I have a life.)

So anyway, my general response to that is that, for me, blogging is like doing warm-up exercizes for my formal writing. (Sorry about the atlantically indeterminate spellings around here.)

Case in point: my lengthy thinking-out-loud post last Friday on the subject of comparative military occupations.

Today, I needed to consult w/ my editor at the CSM about the topic I would be writing a column on, for a probable spot in this Thursday's paper. "Comparative military occupations" was my main suggestion-- and the one she leaped at. (Leapt at?)

Of course, cramming my main points on this into 800 words, while translating the text from blog-ese into CSM-ese, will still be quite a task. But writing the column will be a darn' sight easier because I really have done a lot of thinking-it-through while-- and since-- writing about the subject here.

And now to bed. Lots going on around here that I don't have time to write about. But when I go to bed, I start thinking about-- all the poor benighted souls in the hell-zone that the warhawks have turned Iraq into; my Syrian journalist friend Ibrahim Hamidi who got arrested back in December, shortly after I talked with him in Damascus; all political prisoners everywhere-- what is "going to bed" like for them, every night? -- and the tortured souls in Palestine and Israel who seem so incapable of escaping from their ever-turning treadmill of fear and violence.

So I just give blessings after blessings that I can have a great home and family in such a calm place as here. We had a wonderful Meeting for (Quaker) Worship this morning. Luminous! And we have daffodils now-- finally-- blooming around the blue peace signs in our front yard...

And another blessing: my dear old friend and erstwhile colleague in the Middle East peace-and-justice movement Saad Ibrahim was acquitted last week, by the Egyptian courts, of all remaining charges against him. Hallelujah! (It's over a year now since I wrote a column in Al-Hayat that gently mocked the Egyptian government for continuing to pursue its case against him. I don't know whether that column had much good effect. Let's hope so. Last month, when my husabnd was in Cairo, he got a little bit of time to catch up with our old friend Ahmed Maher, the Egyptian Foreign Minister. AM told Bill that he often reads my Al-Hayat columns with some enjoyment-- but he thinks I'm still "ways too idealistic". That makes me so happy! I would just hate it if some event-- turning 50, say-- had caused me to lose that idealism. Actually, I'm working pretty hard on becoming a Raging Older Woman for Peace, or something.)

Whoa. Didn't I say it was time for bed?