Wake up, editors. No one's said it better than Cathleen. Yes: plagiarism is a problem, even in the middle of global warming, war, and plagues of locusts. We need to be reminded that most media outlets are merely mouthpieces for the status quo. We also need to be reminded that investigative bloggers & internet reporters are doing the heavy lifting in maintaining free speech; this merry band keeping alive, for instance, Day O'Connor's warnings about our slide into dictatorship.

We are engulfed daily by a media bilge tsunami and the truth is drowning in waste. If the bastards are going to vandalize reality, at least they should fabricate their own offal.

For years I worked with people with AIDS. I ran a support group, and members would drift in, do their work and drift out. Over time, new clients would join the group, and some members began to get sicker, as kaposi's grew from a makeup discussion to a pulmonary complication. Then the original members began to die. Leo was our first fatality. One night I was awakened at 3 am by someone shouting my name. About ten minutes later, I received a call from his caregiver telling me that Leo had just died. I found it touching and unsettling.

After that, I heard several men speaking to me as they left, or else I would just have a "feeling" that someone had just died, even if they'd already moved far away from the area. Then the call would come, or I'd mention my premonition to someone else, and they would confide that they too had experienced the same sense. And the call would come.

The most - I can only call it this - amusing episode occurred when our resident extrovert ACT UP member died. In a dream, Tod told me he was stopping by to say goodbye, & not to worry, he was fine. So I sat by the phone & waited. The call didn't come. In the next few days, several friends reported being contacted by Tod, so we finally called his boyfriend. Nope, Tod was in a coma, but still alive. We puzzled over this as more friends were contacted. By the time Tod actually died, two weeks later, we realized we'd been visited in alphabetical order. Tod was going through his Rolodex.

When I finally stopped facilitating the AIDS group, the contacts stopped. I haven't experienced anything like that since, not even with my parents, or close friends who died.

If you decide to have a child, you are already modeling positive behaviours. If you decide not, then you know you have respected yourself. But. The truth is, once you're so evenly divided on an issue, there is no right answer. It is a difficult decision precisely because the options are about equally desirable and distressing on both sides of the issue, and will likely remain so.

And the costs are high if the decision turns out to be, in the long run, erroneous. The presence of children can and does affect a marriage. Children are not always born healthy, whole, and thriving. The process of raising a child introduces new hazards and challenges into a relationship that childfree marriages never experience.

I must disagree with a previous writer. Data are important to any decision, even if your choice is finally to ignore them. It is not only your own heart at stake, it is your partner's, and most important, your child's. Children know when they're not wanted, not cherished, and they will carry this in their hearts forever. If you truly do not want to raise a child through adulthood, you will save the world untold heartache by refraining. If you truly do want to experience parenthood in all its facets, you stand the chance of being happier than you can imagine.

What I can say unequivocally, is that no one else's experiences will help you through this quandary. All these writers want you to validate our own choices by choosing what we chose: Come over to our side. Do what we did. Our team rules. This helps us authenticate our own lives, but does nothing for yours. Be wise, and do what needs to be done.

Reading these posts is a great example of how quickly and scrupulously people line themselves up into an Us vs. Them mentality. People who will see this movie and those who won't vying for the moral high ground; people who believe the official legend of 9/11 ridiculing people who know we've been hoodwinked.

Now bear in mind, this is from a group of people homogeneous enough to be subscribing online to Salon. In English. On Tuesday evening. Morality turns into hostility, mockery becomes scorn and contempt. Now add some xenophobia, and drench this all in way, omigod! WAY too much religious saturation, and suddenly, it is good to kill the foreign devils. We are right, whoever we are. They are merely fodder for our righteous anger. Let us launch our vendetta.

It seems that for as high up on the food chain as we've climbed, we're idiots. And why isn't there some field of science as well funded and researched as, say, astronomy or genome sequencing, devoted to the nature of competition among humans: why we can't write a simple letter without wrangling with previous notes, or walk down a dark street without fearing for our lives? Why we don't recognize murder and treachery for the tragedy it is, and mourn, rather than exploiting our losses as a series of self-aggrandizing opportunities?

We are so damned ready to fight and kill and shout hurrah. I weep for us all.