Running for Your Life: Staying Cool

A pause to kvell. Kate, my daughter, she of the Rosa Luxemburg-like sensibility – “Enthusiasm combined with political thought. What more could we want of ourselves!” http://bit.ly/mIqiTV – burst onto the national opinion-making scene on June 17 http://nyp.st/ielb6l. That’s my daughter! Rosa’s letters, new ones recently published by Verso in English translation, cut to the heart of what I am talking about. Another quote: Attacking the decision by her former revolutionary allies, the parliamentary faction of the German Social Democratic Party, which voted in favor of the munitions budget in August 1914: “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throat.” Thank God Rosa wrote these letters – and that her friends saved them. Kate, I’m proud to say, is cut from this kind of cloth.