![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
esmenet
Posted here partly because I still haven't found a satisfactory replacement for GoogleDocs, and partly because I'm out of practice and could really use some advice on it.
Hermione watches them laughing all together, a little group of happy people wearing different colours, and a thought jarred loose by something in that picture floats up into the front of her mind: Yes, this is the war I signed up for. Obviously untrue, of course; she'd never signed up for anything—
Abruptly, Hermione remembers her father's Howard Zinn books, with bent covers and underlined paragraphs and some of them with little marks where her two-year-old self had banged them on things. He used to read them to her at bedtime, and they always made her lie still and quiet, thinking and thinking about war and class differences and racism and history and everything until she finally fell asleep. She'd meant to bring one of them with her this year, but it hadn't quite fit in her trunk. . . .
—But she had, hadn't she. When she was thirteen (yes, thank you, Draco Malfoy and your bigotry), when she was fifteen (just because the slavery is magical doesn't make it better). When she was eight, and she'd asked her mother why her classmates were always making fun of her hair. When she was born.
It's a stupid, heroic thought she's having, too grandiose in scale to have any real relevance to what she's actually doing. Very Gryffindor, she supposes, if that matters. Big and flashy.
Yes. Yes, this is the war I signed up for. And it's the one that matters, so I'm going to win it.
Hermione watches them laughing all together, a little group of happy people wearing different colours, and a thought jarred loose by something in that picture floats up into the front of her mind: Yes, this is the war I signed up for. Obviously untrue, of course; she'd never signed up for anything—
Abruptly, Hermione remembers her father's Howard Zinn books, with bent covers and underlined paragraphs and some of them with little marks where her two-year-old self had banged them on things. He used to read them to her at bedtime, and they always made her lie still and quiet, thinking and thinking about war and class differences and racism and history and everything until she finally fell asleep. She'd meant to bring one of them with her this year, but it hadn't quite fit in her trunk. . . .
—But she had, hadn't she. When she was thirteen (yes, thank you, Draco Malfoy and your bigotry), when she was fifteen (just because the slavery is magical doesn't make it better). When she was eight, and she'd asked her mother why her classmates were always making fun of her hair. When she was born.
It's a stupid, heroic thought she's having, too grandiose in scale to have any real relevance to what she's actually doing. Very Gryffindor, she supposes, if that matters. Big and flashy.
Yes. Yes, this is the war I signed up for. And it's the one that matters, so I'm going to win it.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-14 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 02:47 am (UTC)I was (re)reading bits of The Zinn Reader the day I posted this, and ended up reading all of Just and Unjust War for what must be at least the third time now. I think that was the reason this post happened, because I was thinking about that and social justice's main aim: that is, not hurting people. And your co-worker's "You're making it sound like we're at war!" Which of course yes, yes we are.