The Hunger Games

By D Sharon Pruitt [CC-BY-2.0
(www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

It hurts. The movie - The Hunger Games - if you watch it, it hurts. I've been home for about an hour, and I'm still zombie-like, stunned, trying to find my numb place. I suspect Tristan feels it too. We've spoken only a handful of sentences since we left the theater. Something dark, palpable, heavy. It weighs on us, that which words cannot transmute to air. I shy from the cliff of tears, the inevitable tumble of pain.

My mother tells me I just feel things more strongly than others do. I can't speak for others; thus I can't know if there is truth to the latter. But as for the former, it is one of the deepest truths I know about myself.

I. Feel things. More. Strongly. 

Everything I Need to Know about Lobbying I Learned in Kindergarten

Photo Credit: Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

Wednesday I got home from KFTC's Economic Justice Lobby Day just in time to pick up Sophie from school. On the way home, I told her, "Sophie-dog (yep, my stepdaughter and dog have the same name, more on that another time) is going to be so excited to see us. I haven't been home all day."

Sophie(-girl), incredulous: "You finally found a job?!?" (Child, if we were cave people, you might not have survived to adulthood.)

Dreams of Joe Hill

Dr. King, "I Have a Dream," 1963

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I am introducing "Dreams of Joe Hill" - the start of a thread of posts about a lifetime of longing to save the world and my first steps (long overdue) as a newborn activist. My story begins October 13, 2010, with an email to my family and friends:

Last weekend, I attended my first ever Kentuckians for the Commonwealth event - the Annual Membership Meeting in Jabez, KY. At the risk of sounding melodramatic – it made my life finally make sense.