WooooHoooo, YaaaaaHoooooo, and all the other exclamatory noises one can make. Thank God. She finally posted again yesterday. My heartfelt plea to her is thus: Please, at least do a one word posting saying 'I'm alive”, or even just 'alive', the next time you take a hiatus. We missed you, we worried about you, and we love you. Please don't scare us that way again. The world would be a much darker place without Riverbend. We already have enough darkness now, we need no more.

River, you symbolize all the unnamed, unknown Iraqi people that are living a life not of your choosing. You are every man, woman, and child that deals with the daily realities of a horrific war. You are their voice. For those of us that have protested this war since the Twin Towers came down you are one of our only beacons of hope. Hope that one day Iraq will emerge from the rubble the United States has made to stand strong amongst your global neighbors. Hope that Iraq will become a place of peace and prosperity, knowledge and enlightenment, hope that it will become a homeland to sustain the Iraqi spirit and pride.

You have such a rich culture and history that spans the ages, Iraq has so much to share with the rest of the world. As horrible as this war is, as long as even one Iraqi remains alive, there IS hope. Darkness only wins if there is a complete absence of light. As overwhelming as a universe of darkness can be, one candle lit, and gently tended, defeats it. When the bombs, and the bullets, and the blood and sorrow seem to overwhelm you remember that. The human spirit can and will triumph, even when it appears all has been lost. Please stay safe, stay alive, use your voice, we are listening.

Since 2003 I've been following 'Baghdad Burning', a blog written by a 25 year old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad. http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ is the URL and I highly recommend those of you that haven't read it take the time to go. Be prepared to laugh, to cry, and to rage at the idiocy of the World of War that we inhabit. The first years worth of the blog has been published as a book, if that helps clarify the quality of the writing and commentary on how her country has been torn apart by western 'freedom'.

The last three years of reading her blog made me feel with her. Feel all the horror of midnight raids by so called 'Iraqi Security forces' that are nothing more than armed, government sanctioned, radical extremists. Made me feel the helplessness of watching neighbors you know aren't radicals being rounded up and taken away......to where no one is ever sure. Made me feel the rage of watching an occupying foreign power make the most insane decisions...and then watching the chaos fall as it may from those decisions. Made me feel scared. This incredible human being, who is stuck in a war zone, whom I feel like I know, might just quit writing. How would I know she was still alive and surviving as best she could if she quit writing?

I've sat with her for the last three years, praying to my God and their Allah to please, blessed God keep her and her family safe. When her cousin left to go home and avoided a car bomb because his mother asked him to get carrots I cried in sheer relief. Every time I checked her site and saw a new entry I'd almost tear up because my deepest fear wasn't true...yet. She was still writing, allowing the world to enter her world and letting us all know that she was still alive and with her family.

Now my deepest fear has surfaced. August the 5th, 2006 was her last blog entry. It's now October the 13th. She has never gone more than three weeks without an entry since she started the blog. Two months and counting and there's been nothing. I've emailed her and gotten no response. WHERE IS RIVERBEND?????????????????

If anyone knows, or has any information please let me know. I'm worried and sick at heart.

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From a philosophical and spiritual perspective why is there suffering in the world? The Orient has given us the idea of Yin and Yang, two sides of the same coin, dark and light, good and bad, pain and pleasure, that can't survive one without the other. Other concepts state it differently but mean the same thing. If there was no pain there would be no compassion. God gives us crosses to bear. We have to have tribulations to grow, trials to overcome. If there was no pain then how would we gage our pleasure?

In some ways I can buy that. When your really cold and wet and hungry taking a hot bath, eating a good meal, and getting into dry clothes never felt so good. Being in a constant state of change helps define who we are, our reality, if you will. The flux we live in, from hot to cold, happy to sad, hungry to full, gives us a sense of place and time to orient ourselves. Rather like a touchstone, a way to find true north.

What this concept does not do is explain man's inhumanity to man and the world around him. Take a look at the world in general. There's plenty of disease, poverty, accidents, natural disasters, sicknesses, and woe to go around without the weak becoming prey for the strong. Hell, plain old mortality jumps up and grabs you when you lose your favorite grandparent or parent. Even if you were to eliminate natural disasters, poverty, illness, and war from the equation you'd still have the grief of loosing loved ones.

Yet as a race we don't seem to be happy with our natural abundance of grief. We have to manufacture more. A never ending supply of hatred, bigotry, hypocrisy, greed, and suffering. It's not enough that we have hurricanes that demolish cities and kill people, tearing families apart. We have to destroy. Destroy anyone that doesn't agree with us, or has something we want.

Nor do we seem to be happy with the plain old stick a knife or a sword in them method. Oh no, we have to make chemicals that poison not only the people we hate but the very earth their standing on. We make bombs that have the capability of literally rendering our planet uninhabitable. There are places on earth that it's not safe to walk. There are land mines, old unexploded munitions, you name it it's out there.

We've also tinkered with germs. It's not good enough that Ebola pops up it's frightening head from time to time. Nope, we have to add it to our arsenal of mayhem, anthrax anyone?Yup we've got that as well. Don't forget about ricin, and the bubonic plague. Even after it killed an estimated third to one half of the population of Europe we keep it around in our various germ warfare facilities.

I pretended earlier today that I was an alien from somewhere else in the galaxy. I knew nothing about Earth or it's inhabitants but decided to check it out. In this scenario I had access to the Internet, could read, and decided to google it before I came down to say hello. I didn't even get through the morning headlines before I decided that the planet was inhabited by the most insane, megalomaniac, suicidal idiots I'd ever heard of or seen. Come down here where I'd be immediately killed? If not locked in a box and experimented on while the rest of the populace tried as hard as they could to do each other in? No thanks. The only positive thing I would be able to beam home was humanities creativity.

Humans had come up with some truly inspired ways to torture, maim, and kill one another. And goodness, some of the things they did to animals were perverse in ways never dream t of at home. They didn't confine their creative hatefulness to themselves alone. Nope, a number of species were completely extinct. Hundreds of others were on the brink, and the beautiful blue planet they lived on was literally groaning in pain at the abuse heaped on her bountiful seas and continents.

We wonder why we don't get any answers back from our huge satellite dishes that are transmitting messages to E.T's? Why would anyone want to talk to us?