The world is on fire. This is always the case. There are forever wars and rumors of war, famine and strife, brother turning against brother -- and sometimes all of them happen at once. This week, with the floods, and the fires, and the political upheavals, my heart has been heavy. I've wanted alternately to act and to hide, to write checks and to dive under the blankets. But the blankets are no place for revolution, and if you don't at least carry the water you have been given, the flames will never dissolve.

First I have to prove to you that I am indeed here in New Orleans with thousands of women celebrating V-Day; so, here's a picture, a gargantuan expression of the vaginal symbol associated with the V-Day movement. It's sitting in the center of the main stage at the Louisiana Superdome.

On April 4, 1968, I was a 5th-grade student at JR Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School in Philadelphia. It was a school within a school -- a school for "gifted" children within a neighborhood school for (I think) mostly Hispanic kids who lived in the surrounding community. I say, "I think" because we never interacted with the kids from the neighborhood school. I only saw them occasionally, from a distance, passing through at the end of a long hallway that we never crossed.