Dissent is not un-American

It's election season and the San Francisco Bay Area is a uniquely odd place to view it from. Odd in the sense that dissent is wonderfully normal here. In a sense it's a pointless place to hold anti-war demonstrations because (almost) everyone will agree with the demonstrators. One of the local centers of dissent is my favorite bookstore on the planet, City Lights, co-founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If you ever get to San Francisco, you have to visit this bookstore.

The two people on the right side of the picture are my nephew Eric and my daughter Kate.

September 8, 2004