let's get fired up! (we are fired up)

please please please read this article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/26/070326fa_fact_packer

And if you are around on Sunday night at 7pm EST, please turn on 60 Minutes and check out the segment on The List Project: http://www.thelistproject.org/

I've become involved in The List Project through one of my best friend's from childhood, Julie.

Her husband, Rajiv Chandrasekaran: http://www.rajivc.com/ is an editor for the Washington Post and was in the Green Zone reporting when the war broke out. He's the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which is currently being made into a movie called "Green Zone" directed by Paul Greengrass, staring Matt Damon and Amy Ryan. The book is so good and it tells a lot of truths that will make you very angry. The movie will probably be nothing like the book but he got to meet Matt Damon.

The article in the New Yorker that I'm linking to above will make you angry too but please you guys, just push past it and read it anyways because you really need to know, if you don't already, what is going on with these Iraqi people who have been trying to help the US and are now running for their lives.

It's ok to be angry. I am very, very angry. I'm angry that I protested this war and was ignored. I'm ashamed that I was too powerless to stop it from happening. I'm ashamed that I was too powerless to stop a man as horrible as George Bush from being elected President of my country TWICE, that his actions have lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, that a country already in great peril has been annihilated.

I have felt absolutely helpless and paralyzed and I had really started turning away from any news about the Iraqi war about the Iraqi people because I started to feel like, "Well what is the point in watching? I can't do anything about it."

Until now.

The List Project is giving all people who truly care about the Iraqi people a chance to finally do something to help them.

These are educated, intelligent, hard working, brave men and women who have risked their lives to help the US by interpreting for them and driving them around Iraq and now the US has abandoned them. Not only has the US abandoned them but their own countrymen have branded them traitors and are basically trying to murder them.

What would you do if you came home and your family dog's head was sitting on your front doorstep with a note that said, "You and your loved ones are next."? And what if you knew the note was telling the truth because friends of yours who had received similar threats had already been beheaded. What would you do?

You would leave. Even if you had a college degree and a career and a house and a wife and children and a mother and father and cousins and aunts and uncles and it was the only place you've ever known, a place you loved. You would leave to save your own life and to save your family. What if you couldn't leave?

It is within the power of the United States to bring these people to safety but they are reluctant to do it because allowing Iraqi's to flee Iraq would be admitting that the war was a failure.

We have to try and get these people to safety. Even if you can not afford to donate money, just knowing this story will help the situation. The more this situation sees the light of day, the more it becomes public knowledge, the less the Bush Administration can do to squash it.

Please go to the website, read the New Yorker Article, watch the 60 minutes episode. Learn about it and talk about it and spread the word. If you don't have money to give then maybe you know someone who does?

We can't open our hearts to every problem in the world. There is too much suffering. We would explode. We can't open our pocketbooks to every problem in the world either or we would become poor ourselves. You have to just go with your gut I think and decide which ones are meant for you. I feel in some way that I was meant to be a part of this.

If you're starting to get this feeling too, then by all means, please join me.

la Ketch