Happy 4th

I know sometimes it's hard, and feels like nothing ever changes, but I swear the work we do really does matter (even if we can't see it just yet; from my local young dems):

Speaking for myself, but recognizing my efforts as merely representative of all of you reading my words - I stood with a handful, maybe twenty other people at Dr. King’s grave when the war started. We all 20 of us stood in protest, when Bush and his lies had everyone else beating the war drums. We stood on the other side of the line from the vast majority of our fellow citizens. And then I listened for literally years while politicians and the media fed us all lines that anyone opposing the war hated the troops and hated America. My own family questioned my loyalty to my country, cutting me to the quick. I have marched, oh how I have marched, to protest the policies of this administration. We hear that now we torture prisoners – the pictures from Abu Ghraib are sickening and no one pays. We hear that we tap Americans’ phones without due process and no one pays. We see with our own eyes that we haplessly and carelessly abandon our own brothers and sisters literally to die in New Orleans. And we abandon our veterans to miserable conditions as they come, wounded and maimed, back from Afghanistan and Iraq. No ones pays. We fire federal prosecutors on a whim and no one pays. We stack the courts – buy the refs – thereby ensuring that NO ONE PAYS.

What are we to do? I have canvassed, OH how I have canvassed – all over North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, doing the only things I know how to change the representation we have. I took vacation from work over and over to speak, to lobby, to write, to call, to protest. And the outrage continues. I have written checks. I have blogged. I have cried, oh how I have cried. I have put my flag out on every holiday, as I will do today, and have done my very very very best to follow in the footsteps of our best patriots by raising my voice in dissent.