Dear Soccer Moms,

Please listen -- please give me a few minutes of your very valuable time. You care about your kids. You care about their future. You want them to have good lives in a better world. We both want that -- for your kids and mine. Heed my words, please. You have got to vote for change -- not a false security. George Bush is not good for you, your kids, or the world. Please let me explain why.

You are not safer than you were three years ago. Indeed, you are less safe -- George Bush's policies on Iraq have terrorized an innocent people who had nothing to do with the tragedies of September 11, 2001. Their only crimes were being predominantly Muslim [5% Christian] and having a despotic leader. Bush's policies of a preemptive war to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction have killed as many as 30,000 Iraqi civilians in a country with 1/12 our population and have poisoned Iraq with depleted uranium, fallout from our weapons [as well as poisoned our troops serving there -- your husbands, your brothers, your cousins, your neighbors -- Gulf War II syndrome seeds have been sowed in our troops' bodies even as his Republican led congress has cut veterans benefits and closed veterans hospitals]. Iraqi people -- who had endured Gulf War I and its depleted uranium causing hideous birth defects in children and 12 years of US sanctions -- have been further brutalized, have been bombed, injured, killed, deprived of electricity, deprived of jobs which the U.S. has contracted out to non-Iraqis -- the list goes on. Is it a wonder some of them are heeding the recruitment messages of al Qaeda terrorists who have recently streamed over the borders from Saudi Arabia? Indeed, Bush's policies have created the very thing they were supposed to stamp out: terrorism and terrorists.

Most of you are not better off then you were four years ago -- the middle class is shrinking, with his tax cuts primarily benefitting the wealthy. He gives a few dollars to you and deprives funding to your states, thus causing them to have to raise your taxes and/or cut your services. His tax breaks benefit companies who have engaged in a massive outsourcing of American jobs to India and other foreign countries and encourage more of the same. While your household budgets are being seriously impacted, corporations are making out like bandits. Since Bush became president 40% more companies are paying no taxes! Some people term it corporate welfare -- and its not trickling down.

What about his promises four years ago? He was going to increase Pell grants so your kids could afford to go to college -- but no. College costs skyrocket and there is no relief. He oversaw the passage of No Child Left Behind but left it seriously underfunded. He was going to protect the environment -- but no, he retreated from the Kyoto Treaty which would have decreased global warming -- the very thing which is impacting weather and increasing hurricane formation. He was going to help seniors afford health care, but his drug prescription law provided a slight discount soon to be overtaken by rapidly increasing prices while the law's provisions deny the federal government the right to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. We see our parents and grandparents choosing between medicine and food.

And in all of this, we have seen our country go from a budget surplus to a huge budget deficit, while at the same time he has been giving tax relief to the wealthy. Your kids and grandkids will be paying it off. Can we afford more of the same? Can our kids, our country, our world afford four more years of this? Surely, not. You know a better world is possible, but it requires change. Stop the war -- John Kerry has a plan. Stop the outrageous spending -- John Kerry has a plan. Money to help people, not hurt people -- to provide a better world for your kids -- John Kerry has a plan. George Bush had four years and he muffed it. Now he gives us more promises. Fool me once, shame on you, George Bush -- but you cannot afford to give him another four years. Your children deserve more. Show the compassion and the wisdom George W. Bush has not. Please. Think. Please. Go to costofwar.com and see how just the war money alone could be better spent. Go to johnkerry.com for more on Kerry's plans. Then go to the polls Tuesday, Nov. 2, and vote for change, vote for your children, vote for John Kerry.

Peace to you and your children,
Kate Anne

Eyes Wide Open -- a Friends sponsored Human Rights Exhibit depicting the dead of Iraq, both American and Iraqi, by displaying empty shoes or Army boots -- has been showing at both Judson Church and at Union Square where I saw it (and Eva took my picture) as I was reading some of the name tags on those sad empty boots. And Eyes Wide Open is at least what some of the people have experienced, I hope, in NYC this past week, when human rights were trampled on in an attempt to silence demonstrators and protect the Republicans' right to free and positive press. A half of million people demonstrated peacefully and their numbers were diminished to a third in much of the American mainstream media. But more than that, people in NYC were rounded up in preemptive arrests -- terrifyingly foreshadowing the fascist world to come if the Bush Agenda succeeds for another four years.

My neighbor Raissa Wu was detained for almost 40 hours at "Guantanamo on the Hudson" -- a police holding pen at 100 Centre Street contaminated by gasoline and oil and other remnants of the vehicles previously housed there -- when she was rounded up in a sweep as she walked with War Resisters who were going to peacefully perform civil disobedience action: a die-in outside of Madison Square Garden. Raissa was going as a supporter, but it didn't matter. They were arrested within one block of their announced STARTING point, painfully handcuffed with these tight plastic bands, and their message silenced -- at least for the moment. Word of sweeps was all over town -- not the mainstream media, of course -- sweeps that nondiscriminantly gathered anyone in sight of certain suspected protesters -- including people who just happened to be in the vicinity. Bush was in our face and we wanted to be in HIS face but many of us were denied our right to freedom of speech and more than 1700 were arrested and detained abnormally long in wretched conditions signed hazardous, exposed to contaminants and forced to sleep on the floor. This is not the end. We must speak up, while we still can.

Last night several of us Queens folk joined Councilmember Eric Gioia and Congressmember David Weiner in a candlelight vigil down at Gantry Park in Long Island City. It meant foregoing the massive Union Square vigil but it was important to talk with them about these abuses and urge our elected officials to do something NOW, even as we all stand up and light candles for a better world, apart from the Bush agenda. We'll continue to speak up and hope Eric and David and others hear us, really hear us, and ACT. Freedom of speech and assembly are essential, if our Constitution is to live.

***
And if you protest and they don't report it, what then?? Joan Pagan, Lynne Friedmann and I joined thousands of women and men at NY NOW's Central Park East Lawn "Code Red" protest rally Wednesday night and I saw no mention of it in Thursday's online press. OUCH. My sign was the classic -- straight from my closet -- Lincoln weeping and the words "Will the party that freed the slaves become the party that enslaves women?" It was snapped repeatedly, but will I see that or any picture turn up anywhere? Ouch, indeed.

So this is hump day on my supposed vacation (from paid work at corporate America but surely not from peace and justice activities). I'm meeting Marcia Schumann at Porter's Restaurant on 7th Ave (betw 22 and 23) to support Air America Radio's Unfiltered Show and spend a bit of time with my friend. This follows Joan Pagan and I having had such a wonderful time there yesterday with our new friends Sarah Burke, Holly Butler, Jason Sanchez, Rodd Marcus, and Suzanne McAndrews -- a spirited bunch! So I repeat myself -- or rather, so I start my day off well, with Unfiltered's terrific hosts Lizz Winstead, Chuck D and Rachel Maddow. I don't know who can beat yesterday's guests, who included Maureen Dodd, Michael Franti and author/cartoonist Ted Rall in person, as well as the chalking biker -- oh, oh, a warning to those of us writing chalked and washable progressive messages on City cement. See http://www.unfilteredradio.com/ and listen to Unfiltered.

Oh, gag, listening to GOP moderates saying that Americans owe it to victims of the Sept. 11th attacks to re-elect Bush? Make us ALL victims (as if we aren't)? Misery loves company? Oh, please, what a dishonor to the those tragically lost, to put this ingenuous lying liar of a pResident back into office to continue to wreak havoc on the middle class, the environment, education, and the budget deficit, to name a few? Rudy sinks to a new low. (Jack Newfield, author of The Full Rudy, spoke of his antics on Amy Goodman's wonderful and streamable DEMOCRACY NOW program.)

But I move ahead, before documenting a few notes on two other events from yesterday, the Shut-up-athon outside of Fox media on 6th Avenue, sponsored by Code Pink and others (I had to bow out as grim cops appeared with steel pens and plastic handcuffs -- Officers Poulos and Boone by me: scary.) And much more healing was the evening's Riverside Church led Ring of Hope, an interfaith vigil of light for peace and justice issues. (Spoke with another FOR member Rev. Carol Huston who with me joined the All Soul's contingent on 81st and First Avenue -- All Soul's has a great peace group.) Holding flashlight torches, we lined the streets of Manhattan in witness. Hope, indeed. Let us continue to speak up and speak out loudly and proudly: peace, justice and nonviolence, oh YES -- but to the Bush agenda: NO!