Brown People Move Slowly!
Several people have pointed this out to me; I thought it deserves a link here:
http://www.rimeallaf.com/mosaics/index.php
Given the amount of panic in London I'm surprised that TFL isn't just printing something like this up as a leaflet and distributing it to anyone who has the misfortune of not looking pasty white in the middle of summer.
As my friend Shaadi put it in his sign when he went to protest the police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/07/319572.html
A Much Needed Break
I needed a break from blogging. I really loved writing when I was in Syria and, though I generally love writing, for some reason when I got back to the US I was spent and didn't want to force myself to write. But tonight I suddenly got the urge to write, so here I am.
I'm currently in London, where the police shot and killed an unarmed Brazilian man in the tube on Friday. They shot him in the head five times. I've read conflicting details of the series of events, but it seems clear to me that the police acted rather hastily and need to be held accountable for shooting an innocent man. There was no reason that this man had to die. Today two of my friends and I went to Scotland Yard to protest. We ran into a group of Brazilians there and walked over to Big Ben with them. We stood there for a few hours, holding up our signs and thinking about how awful it is when paranoia about terrorism grows to have such a grip on a nation that events like these happen.
On the tube ride home, my friend and I noticed some unattended bags next to an empty row of seats. He got up and asked if they were anyone's and finally a man sitting a row away from them said they were his. My friend and I got a little irritated that, after the events of the past two weeks, this man was sitting rather far away from his bags.
