Fifteen years from now you have to make a decision

The greatest love of your life is gonna call during dinner

- Dessa, "Mineshaft II"

"They were alive, and not asleep. Venita was dead, and asleep forever."

- Caroline B. Cooney, from Burning Up

Postscript to yesterday's entry:

I'm rereading a book I loved around freshman year of high school, Caroline B. Cooney's young adult novel Burning Up. It's about arson and race and inequality and segregation and violence, and every few pages I start to cry. For the characters, for the world, for the fact that some people have and others don't, for the fact that people are killed every day in places like Detroit and Darfur and Rockford, Illinois for no real reason.

On Veteran's Day, I saw countless online posts by my friends and acquaintances thanking the men and women of the military for their sacrifices, and for the writers' "freedom." I read these posts with a kind of confusion and ambivalence. It's not that I don't support individual soldiers, but I can't support war. And when was the last time a war was actually fought for "freedom" and "democracy"? And the fact that I do live in a democracy, that my parents were always able to feed and clothe and educate me, that I have lived safely until the age of 22, always seems just a miracle or stroke of luck or accident of fate. That I alive and well in this moment in the vast history of time, that I am in Minneapolis, Minnesota right now typing words on a Mac computer and waiting for the call of a boy to go out to a club--that's just the roll of the dice or the grace of the creator.

I have my bed to sleep in and my food to eat and my car to drive in and my family and friends to hold me close. It's time I started remembering the people who don't have those things. It's time I started figuring out just why I'm here.