This afternoon, I took a break from writing an article to do dishes while listening to Fresh Air on WBUR. Terry Gross' guest, former Marine Donovan Campbell, retold a day in Ramadi, Iraq, when his platoon arrested all the men on one block. With a critical detachment I have tried to cultivate over the years, I listened as Campbell described how the women and children lined up on the street, crying and hitting themselves, mourning their husbands' and brothers' arrest. Campbell said he wished he could tell the women that we (the United States) are not like Saddam. We won't take these men and never return them. "We don't—" his voice skipped here, and he continued after taking a ragged breath "—torture." I could hear in that skip the understanding that what he said was a lie, the shame he felt for our country, and his sadness.

It caught me off guard, and I burst into tears, crying out loud. I stood at the sink with my head resting against the cabinets, holding a cutting board and a soapy sponge as the horror of these wars flooded my mind and grabbed me emotionally in a way that it hasn't in months. Like I did two summers ago, every morning while listening to the news, I cried for our men and women who fight for wealthy lies, for the innocent people caught in this fiasco, for our lost promises of democracy and freedom.

It took a few minutes for me to collect myself enough to return to the mundane and helpless task of finishing the dishes, and I thought again about how much more I could do on this planet. I felt shame at my own laziness, for doing dishes when I could be organizing or protesting. These are important feelings to acknowledge, but they can be crippling if I don't put them into perspective and look for opportunities to empower myself, rather than wading in civil self-loathing.

I've got more work to do today, and so I'm posting this to get it off my chest, to acknowledge the feelings and take a minute to reflect on where I am in relation to power structures and discourse forums. I will brush my cat's fur out, make a cup of coffee and get back to my article.

How do you deal with these feelings? How do you stay emotionally connected with the world and still function every day?