Light-skinned-ed Girl

Bank Freebies?

Our banking system is on the verge of collapse but today at Columbus Circle Citibank was giving out free Metrocards and Sovereign Bank had a couple of guys on Segways giving out refrigerator clips.  Is any of this going to make sense soon?  Is any of this mess going to get cleaned up?

Stoploss, the movie

There is something awkward about the movie, the script, and the direction--but it's as if the film's awkwardness reflects my own feelings of ineptness in knowing how to make a difference.  I don't blog about the war.  Or rather: I don't blog against the war, though I am against it.  I have become numb to the headlines of loss, but today, again I was moved.  The film is a bleak look at how neither individuals nor the collective can stop the continued fighting in a war that should never have been started--but still I must believe it is worth it to pay attention, and to speak up (even if it is this small way).  The movie helped me connect again -- maybe it will do that for you.

I was a Sandinista.

For years this has been one of my best cocktail party stories--No, really, I was a Sandinista, I say, and explain how despite my very middle-class trappings, and bourgeois education and work experience: I was a radical Marxist Sandinista and traveled to Nicaragua in 1985 to protest U.S. involvement in Central America in front of the U.S. embassy.

It's true.  I spent two weeks there with a youth group to promote cultural exchange and information.  Now, I'm not really sure why my mother let me go--Nicaragua was in the throes of a civil war.  The week before we arrived American? nuns had been taken hostage.  There was regular gunfire in the small towns of Leon and Esteli where we visited.  And now, I'm not really sure why I wanted to go.  Thinking about it I know that I was 15 and didn't believe in danger.  And also, I believed in the ideals as I understood them of the Sandinistas.  I believed that society should help the poor, that inequality and injustice should be eradicated.  I believed that as a society we shouldn't tolerate such great disparity between the haves and have nots.

I'm not sure when I started telling people the story of my trip to Nicaragua as if it were a joke--a youthful fling with the far Left.  Was it in college when I wanted so much to fit in with the rich (and everyone was rich compared to me--a scholarship student who worked sometimes two jobs through school) students?  Was it when I was introduced to corporate New York--the luxury of town cars driving you home, summer parties in the Hamptons?  Was it in law school when I chose to do corporate rather than public interest law because I was simply tired of being poor?  When I started telling people about my Nicaragua trip as a joke it was like I was laughing at that idealistic, solidly striving and hopeful young woman I was at fifteen.

Today, Daniel Ortega, former Marxist Sandinista Nicaraguan president, is president of the country again.  He is promising to work with the business community to create alliances and economic stability.  He has abandoned his Marxist plan.

I've abandoned mine too.  But today is Election Day.  And I'm going to vote in a couple of hours.  And it just makes me think: why am I not as passionate as I was about my vision of the world as I was at fifteen?  Do I know what I really believe in any longer?  Or do I mostly believe in my own comfort?