herbivore

i met dennis kucinich yesterday and saw him speak. we were all standing in this little room above a food co-op when he walked in and i swear i almost teared up.

i gave him one of the two final proof copies of the magazine with him on the cover that i have, he said "this is great! who did this?" we shook hands and off he went.

this week is the 10 year anniversary of the genocide in rwanda. somehow at the time i didn't know anything about what was going on in rwanda. at that point in my life i just wasn't paying much attention to the world. i heard an interview with a woman yesterday on the radio. on the first day of the genocide she killed five of her neighbors. 800,000 people were murdered, largely with machetes, in 100 days.

they said because of the tight integration of the society, you couldn't tell a tu-tsi from a hu-tu just by appearance. but everybody had to have an ID card saying which you were, and that's how they decided who to kill.

so it wasn't anything as obvious as black and white or white and latino or black and asian. it'd be like me knocking on my white neighbors door and asking to see her ID, then hacking her with a machete.

anyway, seeing kucinich speak about his proposed cabinet level department of peace during the 10 year anniversary of the rwandan genocide really hit me yesterday and alternately made me feel despair and hope for the world.