amy goodman rocks my world

i'll admit it. i'm an amy goodman groupie.

by some small act of god, amy goodman came to alabama this weekend. this makes four times that i've seen her speak; it's getting a little out of hand. but it means i've learned something about myself...

i think celebrity-worship is a brainless waste of time. i would never giggle, scream, faint or otherwise act hysterical in the presence of, say, oprah or tom cruise or that chick from law and order:svu. but i WILL get more than a little excited, in a beatle-mania sort of way, in the presence of someone like amy goodman (i very nervously asked naomi klein for her autograph once. she's kind of famous, sure, for a journalist/activist, but not in the way that would inspire teenage girls to rip off their bras and toss them onto the stage during one of her public speeches.) so, my spin on hero-worship is a little odd. or, perhaps, a bit out of the mainstream. go figure.

so anyway, amy goodman came to alabama this weekend. s and i drove up to birmingham to see her, in a small auditorium on the campus of UAB. we got there early and watched the other closet radicals trickle in: the doctoral student-couple wearing black, he with dark-rimmed glasses; the middle-aged women wearing birkenstocks; the older couple, in their 70s at least, holding onto each other's arms as they walked inside; the punk anarchist kids with their dreds and their grungy converse. inside, the mood was kind of manic. people spoke in hushed and excited voices. there was a feeling of 'finally!' hanging in the air, that finally here we were together, all hundred or so of us, pouring out of the silent margins of an otherwise conservative state, to listen and talk and get riled together. and oh, it felt so good.

and then we watched amy's documentary, and then she spoke, and she wandered and drifted a bit in her comments, and she seemed more tired than she had in the past, but the crowd didn't care. we are hungry here. hungry for more people like amy goodman, people who speak those truths we're too polite or frightened to speak in our regular lives, who say, 'it's okay to be angry. you should be angry!' people who validate our quiet worries that we're killing our planet and each other for no good reason.

like i said, amy goodman rocks my world.