Real Political Protest

I'm about out of good teabag jokes and I have a Very Important Interview in the morning (cross your fingers for me, OK?). I've spent a bit of time pissing off conservatives on Twitter by posting very good reasons to pay taxes, but honestly, there was a far more significant political protest today, far from the bloated white folks who don't want to pay taxes don't want their tax money going to brown folks want to secede from the union.



It was in Afghanistan, and these are women protesting their repressive treatment.

The New York Times reported:

The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”

The women scattered as the men moved in.

“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”

The women ran to the bus and dived inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

“Whores!”

But the march continued anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

Read the whole article. It'll make you cry, and make your own problems feel very insignificant. There's video, too.

This week's issue of The Nation offers Ten Things you can Do to Oppose the War in Afghanistan, and includes links to women's organizations in Afghanistan that we can support, and I pass them on to you.

Afghan Women's Mission, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the Afghan Women's Mission Newswire and MADRE.

I'd like to be able to say that my tax dollars help Afghan women gain freedom, but we're not there yet. So at least a few of my spare dollars will.