The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

Trust me folks, you hav­en't seen the last of Sarah Palin. The "Disasta from Alaska" is about to become the new Queen of a New Dixie. I know what you are thinking. Alaska is about as far north of the Mason-Dixon Line as you can get and not fall into the Arctic Ocean. There aren't any cotton fields up there and Alaska was still in Russia when we had the Civil War.

But stick with me for a moment before you give up and click away to some other blog. When states like Virginia and North Carolina are seriously considering a black man for president and even Georgia is showing signs of sanity, the old geographical Traditional Dixie is cracking up like pond ice on a warm spring day.

On February 7, 2007, Carmen Cecilia Santana Romaña, a leader of a Colombian agricultural workers union was murdered in her home that she shared with her 3 children and her husband Hernán Correa Miranda, who was also a union leader. Carmen Cecilia Santa Romaña was among the over 2500 union activists killed in Colombia since 1986. Most have been killed by paramilitary death squads with close ties to the Colombian military. The US government has lavished millions on that military.

It's amazing how much terrorism it takes to keep a US approved free market economy going these days. Carmen Cecilia Santa Romaña had visited a Colombian human rights organization in November 2006, and spoke openly of the fear she felt and the intimidation that was part of her everyday life. The father of her children had been murdered and she wanted the killers found. She wanted to return to her home and resume her work as a union organizer, but her actual homecoming turned into a death sentence.

In Jean-Paul Sarte's play, No Exit, 3 people are locked in a room together forever. Eventually they figure out that they are in hell and this is their punishment.

If being locked in a room with 2 other people is hell, what do you call it when the room is on fire and you can't get out?

That's what American writer Florence Lasser explored in her play, The Story of the ILGWU (International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union). One of the episodes includes the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 when 146 mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian women workers were killed because the fire exits were locked. Some of them leaped to their deaths as the flames drew closer.