dream and danger

so i had this dream two nights ago that we had started doing foi and there were two other people doing it with me, well actually, they were doing it and i was watching, along with a bunch of other people in the room as well. and then about a half hour into it, one of the women doing it, whose name in the dream was "kako", took her blindfold off and i got all tense and said, hey why are you doing that? the whole point is to keep the blindfold on! and then she got frustrated with me and said, why are we doing this anyway? do you think that any of this does anything? 

and then i woke up around that point in the middle of my rebuttal argument.

and i think that in the argument i talked about some of these things: that yes, i think that doing foi, does "do" something. i think that committing to this kind of an action changes the person who is doing it. i think that directing your intentions to a situation that is out of your control, but that you have strong feelings about, is "something." i don't think it's everything, it may not even begin to be enough, but it is something. 

iraq body count (www.iraqbodycount.org) puts the estimated civilian deaths in iraq at somewhere between 88, 768 and 96, 887. yesterday i was thinking about that number. i imagined myself on some ridiculous tv show, say something like the "o'reilly show," and i imagined myself saying that number and i imagined bill o'reilly blowing up and saying, oh you got that number from iraq body count, come on!!! (i think i was thinking about a clip i saw on youtube where tim russert had paul krugman and bill o'reilly on and krugman cited "mediamatters.org" as a source of info and bill o'reilly blew up at him). and so i thought to myself, okay, let's imagine that those numbers are inflated. let's imagine that they're "doubling" the numbers. that means 44, 000 people dead. hey, let's imagine those numbers have been doubled. that's 22, 000.. and so on.. and suddenly, i realized the enormity of the numbers that we're talking about. even if the numbers have been multiplied 10 times (and i don't believe that the numbers are wrong), you're still contending with thousands and thousands of dead civilians in iraq alone. it makes me numb as i write it. 

planning this event is turning into a real education, for which i am grateful. and that is something also.

and i wanted just to say also that it's been interesting that a couple of people who are interested in joining this action have expressed (quite justifiable) fear of doing it in their home states, for fear of some kind of potentially violent response. i just think that goes a long way in showing where "demonstration" and "democracy" stand in this country right now.