A Pink Evening

The Whole Earth Festival is back: 20,000 hippies are now in Davis and will be here all weekend. The quad on campus is looking (and smelling) like a different place.

Medea Benjamin, founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink, was in town to talk to the crowd. Washington Code Pink activists seriously disrupted Rumsfeld’s testimony before the House this morning. Her talk focused a lot on this, on the need to get people engaged with the political process (a huge number of non-voters in this country include unmarried women, who also tend to be more progressive: what’s going on?), and on making a personal commitment to change.

How this woman keeps her energy up in the face of all that she knows-she’s been to Iraq several times since winter 2001, and what’s she’s been seeing is a lot worse than we know from the press-is beyond me, but I’ll take it. In pink.