By Kathy Kelly

Members of the Nanum Center in South Korea invited me for a visit.

Immediately before, during and after the Shock and Awe campaign, 2003, several waves of South Korean peace activists and human rights activists joined with Iraq Peace Team members. We felt quite fortunate to learn from them and were heartened by their deep desire to prevent further suffering imposed on innocent people. I visited with the people who had joined with the Iraq Peace Team; lovely, eager people, most of them quite young, who want to find nonviolent alternatives to war. I was greatly impressed to know that many of them are aware of the School of the Americas Watch campaign.

Tom of Tomdispatch.com says of this Rebecca Solnit essay “…this time on death near and far, personal and apocalyptic, in South Asia, in Iraq, and on the death of Susan Sontag; on death that we see and death that we don’t, and on what we might begin to make of it all.”

By Rebecca Solnit

The news of Susan Sontag’s death arrived as a single sentence spoken in the opening moments of a radio news program Tuesday morning, and then the program returned to what had been the main story since the day after Christmas: the tsunami and the death toll, then in the tens of thousands, that would continue to rise. It was strange to weigh these two incidents of mortality against each other. Though for some people it would be considered insensitive or irreverent even to do so, one of the things to be appreciated about Sontag, I think, is that she considered everything a proper occasion for more thinking, more analyzing, more writing.