November 21st, 2004 — the web-wide world
Dear Senator Mikulski,
I am disgusted at your vote yesterday to approve the Omnibus Budget Bill, despite its inclusion of the abhorrent abortion-limitation provisions. In the first major chance for the Democrats to show some spine as the minority party, you buckled. There was no doubt that the bill would pass, but by joining with the Republicans, you gave them further ammunition to claim that they have the majority of America on their side. Was it a CYA move? Well, you were just re-elected by a resounding margin and there will be plenty more opportunities to CYA in this new one-party government. Was it because you wanted to “get home for the holidays?” Personally, I and the millions of other Americans whose holidays don’t begin until Wednesday evening don’t care about your precious holidays when you members of Congress already receive much more time off than the average American. This was a shameless, spineless move by a politician I expected more of, and it leaves me with further dread for the next four years.
Dear Senator Sarbanes,
I want to thank you for casting your vote in opposition to the Omnibus Budget Bill in the Seante yesterday, and for voicing your strong opinions against the shameless inclusion of the anti-privacy clause inserted by Representative Istook during closed chamber sessions late on Friday night. Even though it was never in doubt that the bill would pass, we need every Democrat to be on the record against any such Republican maneuvers, preventing them from claiming that they have any kind of mandate. As your colleagues said last night: When the Republicans are being shameless, the Democrats must not be spineless.
November 21st, 2004 — brain-candy, the web-wide world
Suicide is often seen as a weakness, an inability to cope with the pressures of everyday life. I don’t know what went through Iris Chang‘s mind just before she ended her own life on November 9, but, for the 36-year-old Chinese-American historian, it most likely wasn’t “everyday life” as you and I know it.
Nearly 10 years ago, she went to Nanjing, China (formerly Nanking) to begin researching the book which would eventually become “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II“, an international best-seller and the first book to expose the horrors of that event to the Western public. It was nearly 60 years after the Japanese invasion of China, and her visit represented one of the last opportunities to interview the survivors of the massacre. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
“It all had such a huge impact on her mind,” recalls Duan Yueping, then assistant curator of the Memorial Hall of the Nanking Massacre Victims, who worked every day with Chang, guiding her to massacre sites and through stacks of documents and photos.
Duan, a tough middle-aged woman who studied the Nanjing atrocities for years and considers herself a seasoned pro, still has nightmares from the stories she’s heard and photos she’s seen. Chang, she says, worked incessantly in Nanjing interviewing survivors, immersed in graphic pictures and documents, all the while agonizing over why the story was not widely known outside China. By the time she left Nanjing, Duan says, Chang was physically weak but even more committed to telling the story.
“The subject matter had to affect her. Perhaps she could not bear it,” Duan says, her eyes filling with tears as she pulls out a picture of herself and Chang at a dinner in Nanjing.
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