Vigil

I recently found this picture in a series of photos about life in Olympia, Washington. The Olympia FOR chapter has been conducting weekly vigils since 1980!

Pictured at left is Glen Anderson, who has just rejoined FOR's National Council.

Kudos to the Mid-Missouri chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. They organized a vigil to mark the 4,000th U.S. servicemember's death in Iraq and got good coverage by the Missourian and TV station KOMU.

This weekend is the annual protest and vigil in Fort Benning, Georgia against the School of Americas (recently renamed to "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"). Many of our colleagues from FOR will be there, and I hope to get them to post some updates here on the blog during the event.

Meanwhile, ¡Presente! magazine has a fascinating collection of videos like the one above, and lots of informative articles, including this one about the impact of the SOA in Colombia:

I love this time of September! In Minnesota, where I live, it is the time of year for holding on and letting go of The Lake. This means both the experience – swimming, boating, beaching – and the idea itself, that is, the idea of vacation, la vida facil, a perpetual summer.

When I was a kid, we would wait for my Dad to get home from teaching high school, probably around 4 in the afternoon, and then assess the situation: Can we go the lake another day? This was the holding on.