Please Spread the Word: Vote from Abroad.org
Mon Aug 14, 2006 at 07:16:58 PM PDT
Oi. 3 solid original paragraphs required when all I really wanted to do was get the word out about the voting tool for Democrats, progressives, and other sane Americans living abroad. Okay, well, here's the serious political word, and then the original paragraphs will follow:
A MESSAGE FROM YOUR DEMOCRATS ABROAD INTERNATIONAL EXECUTIVE AND VOTER REGISTRATION COMMITTEES
http://www.votefromabroad.org/ needs you!
Can you believe it? The world is falling apart. The lunatics are running the asylum. Global warming and record temperatures; Yet another Mid-East catastrophe; Iraq's agonizing descent into chaos; More and more tax cuts for the top; No health insurance for close to 50 million Americans; Rising religious fundamentalism at home and abroad...
You can help stop the madness by registering at
http://www.votefromabroad.org/
more below.
Have you requested your ballot to vote in the November 7 election, when we have a chance to take back one or both houses of Congress?
Have you contacted 10 friends/relatives/colleagues to get them to register?
Finally, have you made a modest Sustaining Donation to Democrats Abroad to help us advertise for http://www.votefromabroad.org/ Just $10/month (less than three designer coffees) from 10% of our global membership would raise more than a quarter of a million dollars to get the word out to millions of potential overseas voters!
You can help by going to our website -
http://www.democratsabroad.org/ - and clicking on Contribute, then on Sustaining Donor. It's easy and secure.
Together, we can help stop the madness!
PS. Don't forget that Americans living abroad need to request and send in our ballots a lot earlier than November 7th! Please request your absentee ballot today at http://www.votefromabroad.org/ - in English or in Spanish!
now for the original paragraphs, which are completely self-indulgent, unrelated musings and can be skipped with impunity, should you so choose:
1. I'm watching one of our neighborhood's dozens of well-fed feral cats do an effortless balancing act across the brick wall behind the garden of my room in an obscure part of Tokyo. He or she sits comfortably and seems to have no problem at all balancing on the thin edge.
I envy it. My own life is nowhere near balanced, and I have to smack myself around as I have an unfortunate tendency to whine. Then feel guilty, as I am not, after all, being bombarded in Iraq or Lebanon, or blown up in Israel, or starving in an African country, or in abject poverty in the West Virginia hills...
2. So, I've been, as some AfricanAmerican women do, wearing weaves and other additions to the hair God gave me, for many years. I just didn't feel feminine without at least longish hair to balance the rest of me (which tends not to long, but to round). But in this crisis of...dunno, confidence? consciousness? whatever...that this close to 49th. year is handing me (I keep trying to give it back, but to no avail), I just lost patience with myself and the process, took it all out, and am sitting here with about a dime's worth of natural afro on my...um, what is it the young ones say, grill? no, that's my face, hormones haven't run that far away from me yet...um pate? no, that's reminiscent of some kind of food, um...head. On my head.
Part of the thinking that led to the change was precipitated by reading a post by one of the Heroes of Connecticut, being appreciated by some folks for his pulchritude (men can have that, right?), and some of the appreciators were talking about being older women and yet still being interested in romance, and the fine young man made clear his interest in his biological peers, and I sensed a sadness...
3. Just when I want to wallow in various self-recriminations and guilts and angers and illness and lots of other gnarly stuff (see, I speak jive) and hibernate till it's all better, the Howard Dean within reminds me that what I'm really worried about and desperate to change, is the state of the world with George Bush in it. And how this adversely affects gorgeous toddlers with big grins, and young teens holding hands (either literally or symbolically), and women of experience whose eyes still laugh, and men with booming voices and delightful beards that tickle as they hold tiny babies then lift them high in the air, to get them to stop crying...stop crying.
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