When I was growing up, my hero was my mother. She came to this country from Peru at age 22 with little money and speaking no English. She had arrived in the summer, with two friends, to work and have an experience abroad. But when the end of the summer came, instead of packing up with her friends, my mother decided to stay. Truly, she'd known she was going to stay before she even left Peru.



She made a good life here, taught herself English, and worked hard. She agreed with my father that all their efforts should benefit the children, and so my brother and I had a great time growing up. We traveled all over Europe before I was 10, had season theatre tickets throughout our childhood, and ate probably better than anyone in this country ever has who didn't have a professional chef as a parent.

Mom read poetry, did batik with neighbors, knitted me some six dozen sweaters, fixed the plumbing, and screamed at the TV during the Super Bowl. You've never really experienced American football until you've heard a woman with a Spanish accent screaming for everyone to please stop hitting Lynn Swan.

Two years ago Mom died of cancer. A pain in her leg metastasized quickly and took her life only two months after she was diagnosed. Her recipes and her wild garden are her legacy, along with my brother and me. And in a similar way, this country of ours is the legacy of all those who broke their backs for an idea. Let's please not tarnish that idea by devoting any time to the pathetic story of someone we know only because her father is rich.

Instead, let's turn our attention to the men and women of the armed forces, and to their families, who face daily stresses most of us cannot even imagine. Or to those who make up the working poor--people who struggle in multiple low-paying jobs and live in cramped housing just to get by. Let's focus on teachers, who shape the future of our country every day. Let's focus on what matters and leave what doesn't to fade away like beer stains on Royal Street after a Mardi Gras parade.

The U.S. Military is embracing YouTube--and simultaneously banning soldiers from accessing the video sharing site while overseas. Netscape Navigator _kam0_ submitted this BBC story yesterday, which describes the military's new official channel on YouTube. About two months old, the Multi-National Iraq-Force channel gives the military an opportunity to highlight positive progress in Iraq. According to the BBC's Laura Smith-Spark:

An estimated 30,000 prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib Prison by Saddam Hussein, their bodies buried in shallow mass graves, and in most cases, all record of their existence erased. Shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam granted amnesty to all living persons incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. He then used the vacated prison cells to incinerate reams of documents recording the misdeeds that had taken place at the prison.

in Rory Kennedy's documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, both baby-faced grunts and seasoned intelligence professionals describe feeling "haunted" on the grounds of the prison. There were wild dogs digging up corpses, DayGlo portraits of Saddam still adorning the walls, and the pervasive funk of sweat and human feces exacerbated by the 130-degree heat. It was, in short, a climate that sapped soldiers of the ability to exercise rational morality. It's Kennedy's thesis that this climate turned soldiers into the perfect vessels for a defense policy that was willfully defiant of the Geneva Conventions, thus making the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal possible.

Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival on the morning after Bush's State of the Union address, Kennedy (the daughter of RFK and niece of Senator Ted Kennedy) says she came to the project almost by accident. "I had originally planned to do a very different film, which was more about the nature of people who commit extraordinary acts of evil, and we were looking to genocides to exemplify that. And then I, like so many other people, was really horrified by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib. I saw them and found myself asking very similar questions: Who were these people, and what motivated them? Were they the kids next door or were they psychopaths?" When the director asked the soldiers themselves why they had participated in the abuse, they all gave her the same answer: "I did it because I was told to do it.'"