The peace vigil in front of the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue continues and so does the hideous occupation of Iraq by American, British and a dwindling number of other troops from around the world.
This weekly hour-long vigil, which meets every Thursday from noon to 1PM, started during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and horrible events just keep overtaking that defining moment.
After the vigil, a loose group of individuals from different religious groups at the vigil share a cheap lunch at a neighborhood Vietnamese greasy spoon on Golden Gate Avenue, headed by the spiritual father of the group, Markley Morris above.
What's probably most delightful about the group is how individual each person is. Instead of groupthink, which is what the vigil represents in some respects, everybody seems to have their own opinion about everything which is delightful.
On Friday afternoons, from 1 to 3 pm, the local political polemicist h. brown holds an invitation-only political salon at a South of Market burrito parlor.
Anywhere from two to thirty people show up on any given Friday, and it's usually a very lively crowd.
Though the group is almost monolithically "progressive" in their politics, they also think very much for themselves and the arguments can get quite heated and very funny.
h. brown is retiring from the fray in San Francisco in the fall to go live at some hippie hot springs up north where he can write his novel about all the ghosts of dead friends who need to see the light of day through his imagination.
Before doing so, however, he's decided to dedicate his life to getting Krissy Keefer, who is part of this crowd, elected to Congress as the Green candidate against Nancy Pelosi this November.
Click here to check out her website.
Whether you're on the left or the right of the political spectrum, what a treat it would be to see the last of Nancy Pelosi who stands for nothing but enablement and accommodation for the worst tendencies of our new corporate state.
Yesterday, Congresswoman Pelosi tried to harness the power of the blogs and wrote an idiotic piece of pablum on the Huffington Post entitled, "Zarqawi's Death Should Be a Call for Debate on Iraq Policy."
As a number of commentators pointed out, her words rang a bit hollow after having voted for every appropriation ever proposed for the Iraq adventure, not to mention her "let's bomb Iran speech" in front of the Israeli lobbying group AIPAC recently. Click here to read Pelosi's post and the wildly derisive comments from all over the political spectrum.
Krissy Keefer from the Green Party would make for a nice change.
3 comments:
Krissy gets on my nerves. In addition to looking kind of like a man, she has hardly lifted a finger to campaign. She seems to think that simply being on the ballot and not being Pelosi is enough reason to vote for her.
I love the theme: peaceniks and progressives eat lunch.
I'm glad you've adopted the Quaker peace group. I used to think the verb "witness" in this political context was pretty weak.
I've come to understand that such public witness refutes the falacious "argument from common knowledge" that we get from the govt and the press.
For instance, the millions who took to the streets prior to the Iraq invasion refute the assertion that "everyone thought Saddam had wmd."
Or, these days, "No one thinks we should withdraw immediately." Well, the Quaker witness group does (me, too).
"being on the ballot and not being Pelosi is enough reason to vote for her." You know, I think that is enough to vote for Krissy. Gotta stick it to Nancy on every possible occasion in order to get anything out of her. /smile.
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