Timeless Speech concerning Peace

New Jersey Ends Death Penalty

Via Vox Nova:

Thanks be to God

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

-DH Lawrence

"Workers Left Behind"

Yep

The Government

It seems as if many Conservatives can't imagine any use of government that isn't coercive and oppressive. That says more about them than it does about the government, I think. It also explains a lot of what the Bush administration has done.

Government, ideally, serves the interests, the common good, of the people it governs. There is nothing innately oppressive about governments per se.

People oppress, people send others to unjust wars, people neglect the interests of anyone except the already powerful. Governments won't be accountable on Judgement Day: only the people who led them.

Get a Kleenex...

...and then read this

Lyrics

This, from In My Heaven by Mary Chapin Carpenter, struck me as Catholic in its sensibility. I have no idea what her religious affiliation is, if any:

For every soul that's down there waiting,
holding on, still hesitating
We say a prayer of levitating, in my heaven