There is a very straight-laced coworker who runs a bankruptcy/economy news stories list within my workplace. She is always on me to "feed" her more stories. I ran across this today: How coke-addled geeks crashed the global economy, and I'm very tempted to send it to her. Inappropriate? Yes - but funny.

Doing the right thing can be awfully boring.

It is exactly this kind of thing that makes me fear and loathe travel.

The Social Responsibilities Special Interest Section (SR-SIS) of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) continues its tradition of giving something back to the community that hosts our Annual Meeting with its tenth annual Children’s Book Drive -- "A Book for Every Child".

SR-SIS has selected the Willamette Writers Books for Kids program as the recipient of the 2008 AALL Children’s Book Drive.

This book donation program distributes over 23,000 books annually to underprivileged children and teenagers served by over 50 organizations throughout the Portland area, Oregon state, and SW Washington state. The recipient agencies give the books to the children. Hospitals, shelters, literacy programs, alternative schools for homeless youth, and reading mentor programs are involved in the Books for Kids program. More information is available at http://www.willamettewriters.com/1/books-for-kids.php.

Donating books is easy!

Use the online AALL Book Drive 2008 Wish List at Powell’s Books online (Powell’s Books is based in Portland). The list includes award-winning children’s titles and works requested by the Books for Kids program. The Wish List is available at http://tinyurl.com/2hvv2c. You can also donate a “gift card” from Powell’s Books, http://www.powells.com/powellscard.html.

All books, gift cards, and monetary donations (checks made out to "AALL") should be sent to AALL Book Drive team member, Jorge Juarez. His address is:

Mr. Jorge Juarez
Northwestern School of Law
Lewis & Clark College
Paul L. Boley Law Library
10015 S.W. Terwilliger Blvd.
Portland, OR 97219-7799

Please donate if you can. This is a wonderful program, and it really makes a difference to the kids who benefit from it. And please feel free to spread the word. For anyone who wants to link to this post, the URL is http://sweet-byrd.livejournal.com/352775.html

Lori Gottlieb's recent piece in The Atlantic is annoying. It isn't just her obvious belief that her circle of friends is exactly like everyone else -- and therefore the conclusions she draws based on a couple of chit-chats with her girlfriends are valid of society at large. It is that she is so damn nearsighted about the whole thing. In all her fretting about being husband-less (and self-conscious assertions of her feminist cred, she can only conceive of the problem like this:

By the time 35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation. ...At their core, (these jokes) pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection.

I really, really dislike that the choice is presented as "settle or hold out for Prince Charming and risk dying old, alone surrounded by cats and tottering piles of National Geographics". Never once does her mind flit to the possibility that the mythological man-on-a-white-horse is an absolutely unrealistic fairy tale that otherwise intelligent women inexplicably believe in. Oh sure, she does toss off the observation that the 'man of your dreams', "doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up" (italics in the original), but she doesn't pursue that line of thought. In fact, it is this evidence of the author being almost, but not quite, not lost that is so painful.

A case in point: she does observe (rightly) that, "All marriages, of course, involve compromise". But two paragraphs later, she recounts all the guys she didn't "settle" for and eventually broke up with, including, "someone who appeared to be highly compatible with me— we had much in common, and strong physical chemistry— but while our sensibilities were similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens." The guy wasn't her 100% perfect fairy-tale prince, so she broke up with him? Because marrying a mate who is a mere 98% perfect match would be "settling"? Did she think that all of the "compromise" would be on his side? Or that it would be magically unnecessary because, he'd be 100% perfect? Methinks Ms. Gottlieb has a reality problem.

Again, she is right in her observation that, "what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship." But she misses the point that the challenge and the beauty of marriage is not only finding a person who has both qualities or in bringing out both of those qualities in yourself, but balancing the incandescent passion with the workaday realities of life, and allowing your bond to grow deeper and wider with time and experience. There is no such thing as perfect, because that would imply that either the people or the relationship had crystallized -- frozen in form. People evolve, circumstances change (sometimes from minute to minute), and the relationship grows, too. Marriage isn't a noun -- it is a verb -- a vast dance in which you'll sometimes move with perfect grace, and other time trod upon your partner's toes. And sometimes life will throw in some plates for you to juggle, too. And you just need to keep moving -- laugh when you drop a plate, forgive your partner when he steps on your toes (and beg forgiveness when he steps on yours) -- and realize that marriage isn't a place, isn't a goal, isn't a thing at all. It is a process, just like people are processes.

So Lori, honey, you'll never find your perfect man, and you aren't perfect, either. But the dilemma facing you isn't "settle or not settle?", but "when will you realize that perfection isn't an option?". Because it is only after realizing this that people can go about being imperfect together in an imperfect world. And I'll tell you -- after a while you realize that even when your feet are sore and your partner does the funky chicken when the band is playing a waltz, when you dance with the right partner, imperfection can be perfectly beautiful.

He is the man who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib. He was a reserve soldier in Iraq in 2004. He was given a CD of the photos by one of the people involved. In the words of one profile, "They were photographs of his colleagues, some of them men and women he had known since high school - torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners."

And so, stunned and disgusted, Darby turned the CD over to a special agent of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command. He was promised anonymity and hoped that that would put an end to it.

But he was scared of retribution.

Darby said in an interview, that "Four to six weeks before they were charged, … they were still on the installation. They still had their weapons. They just weren't working in prison".

In another interview, he noted that, "At night when I would sleep, they were less than 100 yards from me, and I didn't even have a door on the room I slept in. I had a raincoat hanging up for a door. Like I said to my room mate, they could reach their hand in the door - because I slept right by the door - and cut my throat without making a noise, or anybody knowing what was going on, and I was scared of that."

When the defendants were finally arrested, he thought he could sleep easier.

And then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blew his cover. He was sitting in a crowded Iraqi canteen with hundreds of soldiers when Rumsfeld came on the television and said, "There are many who did their duty professionally. First Spc. Joseph Darby, who alerted the proper authorities that abuses were occurring".

Darby says that he does not believe that Rumsfeld's words were accidental. "I really find it hard to believe that the Secretary of Defense of the United States has no idea about the star witness for a criminal case being anonymous." He later received a letter saying that Rumsfeld had intended to praise Darby, and had no idea of his anonymous status.

But whether Rumsfeld's words were intentional or not, I am gratified to say that Darby found that most of the soldiers he talked to said that he had dome a good thing. In fact, many stories report that most of the soldiers in his unit shook his hand.

The attitude stateside was a different story.

Many in his home town call him a traitor. When Darby was named, his wife had to flee to her sister's house which was then vandalized with graffiti.

One reporter interviewed people at a bar in Darby's home town. He elicited quotes like, "If I were [Darby], I'd be sneaking in through the back door at midnight", and, "They can call him what they want, I call him a rat." The commander of the local VFW post has said, "He was a traitor. He let his unit down. He let his fellow soldiers down and the U.S. military. Basically he was no good".

Threats against his wife and mother drove him and his family from their home in Maryland. They lived under armed protection for the first six months. The Army's security assessment of his hometown concluded that "the overall threat of harassment or criminal activity to the Darbys is imminent." Darby and his family have moved to a new town. They have new jobs. People on both sides of his family have turned against him.

"Ignorance is bliss they say but, to actually know what they were doing, you can't stand by and let that happen," Darby said in an interview with 60 Minutes II, "We're Americans, we're not Saddam. We hold ourselves to a higher standard. Our soldiers hold themselves to a higher standard."

Thank you, Joe Darby. Thank you for being the kind of soldier my grandfathers would be proud of. Thank you for standing up for what you know is right. Thank you for holding yourself to that higher standard and for understanding what patriotism really is. Thank you.

Every year, the Social Responsibilities Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries sponsors a children's book drive to benefit a school or schools in the city in which the AALL conference is being held. ( This year’s efforts will benefit two of the most needy schools in the St. Louis area, Central Elementary and Vashon 9th Grade Academy. )

I know that not everyone is in a position to help out, but please help if you can -- even if it is only by passing this information on when the opportunity presents itself (in fact, please repost and otherwise pass this information on. The more people who see it, the better). This is a really wonderful program, and it helps schools and kids that really need all the help they can get. And I can personally vouch for the fact that every book and every penny donated goes to the libraries.

The American Red Cross is coordinating a massive relief effort across the Gulf Coast. Their disaster relief fund has been much depleted by the Indian Ocean tsunami. They've set up a donation page with Yahoo, because their normal online donation services were being swamped.
http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate/