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Peace by Pieces
Tia Steele, whose stepson was killed in Iraq, at the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit in Baltimore. "We can do something and we are doing something," she says.
(Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
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She was stunned when David signed up for the Marines, but she didn't try to talk him out of it. He was a thoughtful young man, figuring out his own path. He took "War and Peace" to the battlefield.
He was killed kicking down a door in Fallujah. He was 21.
To her, none of the administration's evolving justifications for the war withstood scrutiny -- 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, global war on terrorism, building democracy. But she did not openly dissent until she got her own Report of Casualty. She quit her job to coordinate "Eyes Wide Open" and now hopes to find work in the movement.
"David can't have died in vain," she says. "I have an obligation to his honor and to the David that I loved to do something about this craziness. . . . This war is a lie. To keep perpetuating it is to cause more damage."
The View From Here
A huge collage covers one wall of Busboys and Poets, a scrapbook of a century's worth of struggle for peace and justice. Portraits of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Joseph McCarthy. Demonstrators being beaten. The naked napalmed Vietnamese girl running down the road.
Painted across the top are the simple words of Langston Hughes:
Let America be America again
Let it be the dream it used to be
This is the fundamental yearning of protesters who consider themselves patriots.
Shallal, 50, painted the mural himself. His family came to Washington in the mid-1960s, when his father was ambassador of the Arab League. After Saddam Hussein seized power, they could not return.
Shallal became a researcher in medical immunology at the National Institutes of Health, then switched to the restaurant business -- he also owns Mimi's American Bistro and the Luna Grill near Dupont Circle -- and became active in peace issues. He camped in Crawford, Tex., with Cindy Sheehan.
He expects a lot of the land where now he is a citizen.
