For Riverbend

I feel like throwing-up.  I'm so ashamed, bewildered, upset, horrified, embarrassed and disgusted.  I could name more terrible words but you get the idea.  I just read this article, "Words from the heart of Baghdad: Woman's blog touches Americans worlds away", by Tom Engelhardt in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle.  It's about a modern-day Anne Frank, trapped in a war-ravaged Iraq and how she blogs about it instead of writing a diary.  She does it in English so she can reach out to Americans.  She believes the report that says 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war began.

It's not only that number that makes me sick to my stomach but the way the author of the article says she describes the life she lives now, the hope she had before American troops invaded and that is now lost.  The blog is "Baghdad Burning" and her alias is 'Riverbend.'  Her blog has also been made into a book with the same name.

Always a skeptic, I checked out the blog in a variety of different places and it's for real.  She has screen shots from Iraqi TV, descriptions of scenes in Iraq that could only be from someone who's lived there, and she seems to what's going on in that area from firsthand knowledge.  Not that I don't trust the Chronicle, but I wanted to see for myself.  The blog got me hooked instantly - I can see why it's won awards.

The thing that is so riveting to me is not that she's writing so openly about something so grim but that she could be any one of us.  She's a woman in her twenties(okay so we're a little past there), she used to work as a computer programmer, she speaks English, seems smart and she's very articulate.  She's not a mother, but that's probably a good thing given the life she lives.

I would like to dedicate all of my political blog posts here over this week to Riverbend and mothers in Iraq.  We complain about our high property taxes and our competition for kindergarten classes and our lack of soccer fields, but they're just trying to survive.  Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian - we're all lucky to be living here.  For their sake and ours, I hope we make the right choices to help women everywhere.