Mourning in America: Somehow, when we see footage of Iraqi mothers wailing amid the rubble of their destroyed homes for dead children buried beneath, it seems so...distant. But watch Lila Lipscomb in Fahrenheit 9/11, physically doubled over by grief at the loss of her son in Iraq, and the destruction of war hits home: my son/friend/brother could be next. Naomi Klein writes how the parents of the fallen--Nicholas Berg's father, Michael Pedersen's mother (Lipscomb), Patrick McCaffrey's mother (who defied Bush's ban on filming caskets returning home)--are finding their voice through grief. And while they don't have the numbers to outweigh the votes of NASCAR dads and soccer moms in swing states, they "might just change something more powerful: the hearts and minds of Americans."

Fury is an entirely appropriate response to a system that sends young people to kill other young people in a war that never should have been waged. Yet the American right is forever trying to pathologise anger as something menacing and abnormal, dismissing war opponents as hateful and, in the latest slur, "wild-eyed". This is much harder to do when victims of wars begin to speak for themselves: no one questions the wildness in the eyes of a mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter, or the fury of a soldier who knows that he is being asked to kill, and to die, needlessly.