No, you don't want to read this diary.  You won't agree with it.  It will make you angry.  You are better off just reading something else.

Let me be frank here.  This is not the sort of diary that anybody will ever rescue.  Not at all.  In fact, this is the sort of diary that gets blindfolded and shot at dawn.

Well, maybe you are the sort of person who, in passing a door that says "Do Not Enter" just can't help wondering what's behind the door.  No.  Not a good idea.

Open the box if you must, Pandora, but do not say I didn't warn ya.

You have heard this story before.

The Southern chunk of the continent, after years of rising tensions, breaks off and tries to form a country by itself.  Bloodshed and hardship ensue, families are split apart, the war drags on for years, but in the end the tenacity of the rebels and the leadership of an incorruptible Virginia general carry the day.

Wait.  That's not how it ends.

Man, were we ever good.  We had the touch.  We had the magic.  We could do anything.  You had to see us to believe us.

We can't take credit for the Civil Rights movement, we were just kids in its heyday.  But before we got involved, before we joined the protest marches and the Freedom Rides, the progress of the movement could be measured in inches per decade.  Then we show up and it is like the Gordian knot untied itself, all of sudden the phrase "leaps and bounds" is needed.  It was like a huge chemical reaction and all the elements were lined up but nothing was happening because there had to be a catalyst.  Boom, along came the catalyst.

Once there was a woman.  A woman of peace, a woman of the Left, a woman who spoke her mind.  A woman who never shied from controversy, a woman who took positions that (or so it seemed) nobody else was willing to take.  A woman who was unafraid to be herself.  And who, however improbably, managed to earn for herself a seat in the Congress.

Perhaps when you think of that woman, you think of Jeanette Rankin.  Or Bella Abzug.  Or perhaps you think of Cynthia McKinney.

The figures loom in our consciousness from an early age.  They have been around for centuries, if not millenia.

The stories each generation tells the next:  The poor woman in the Biblical story who goes to the prophet when the debt collector threatens to take her two sons as slaves for the debt she cannot repay...  Rumpelstiltskin demanding the firstborn child...  Shylock asking for his pound of flesh.

Everywhere the debt-collector lurks, cruel, implacable, devoid of human sympathy (although, Shylock has some, granted).