Final countdown

One week.

That's all that's left. One little week and then I am a free woman. Well, so to speak. I guess I'll never really be free, but...
at least I can take care of all the other marvelous shite that awaits. 8 days, 9... Tomorrow night I will go to a talk by an author whose book moved me. Diana Taylor's Disappearing Acts. She examined, in 1997, the modes by which the Argentine government essentially cast its population as an internal enemy and waged its dirty little war on subversion, liberal thought and free speech, to name a few. It sent shivers down my spine. Not because I was shocked and horrified by the terrorific displays of human cruelty (sadly by now, I am accustomed, perhaps even desensitized- no not that, not ever), but because I was smacked in the face with the infinitely similar situation into which this country that I like to call ours, without calling it Ours, with a capital "O", is slipping. Torture? Ah well, that is in another country. Civil liberties being curbed? That's just an immigrant issue, doesn't affect "us". Unlawful surveillance? Neighbors policing one another? That doesn't happen here. Only it does, or at least it is beginning to, and we are sitting complacently waiting for someone else to DO SOMETHING. But no one ever does.

I had to go in and check on her several times that night, make sure she was breathing, touch her face with my lips, breathe in her scent. Imbibe her humanity, her purity, her goodness. I wept for the mothers who were killed, whose babies were stolen, for the children who watched their parents be murdered, in broad daylight, by the Authority. She protects me from that abject truth, and yet, it is my duty to protect her. The road to a fascist, intolerant, torture hungry state is a slippery slope and when it begins, history tells us, civil society is obliterated. Let's not forget.