I talked to a woman yesterday who complained “everybody these days is up on their soap box.” I saw a man I know reading Confessions of A Hit Man in the park and he cast it aside saying, “Isn’t it kind of obvious, that we do this bad stuff all over the world?” I talked to a boy in the coffee store and he said hopefully, “It’s almost over, isn’t it?,” meaning the Bush presidency, or perhaps the state of things. I read the editor’s letter in a friend’s magazine and he wrote with such excitement about the people and places he had newly discovered, adding, “anyway nobody wants to hear my political views.” There was fear to speak up and then there was a lot of heat and talk, and now it seems a certain resignation is setting in. A defensive posture perhaps, even a sadness. We changed the Congress; it did nothing. Cindy Sheehan went home. We’re still in Iraq. Alberto Gonzalez, the president's former attorney, is still Attorney General. The American military is still torturing people and we're still being spied upon by the NSA. The Bush administration refused to sign another deal to stop climate change. The Bush administration refuses to acknowledge that the majority of us hate them and what they are doing to us and the world. I talked to a woman who visits shamans and prays with mandalas and crystals and she said, “The first step in changing the world is changing ourselves.”