Spent this weekend doing various errands to get ready to head off to TorCon. Which means: doing laundry! Can't show up in a dirty Clarion West T-shirt, can I? (Also, refilling prescriptions, taking back library books, charging the Handspring Visor, and a host of other small tasks.)

I was a model of restraint when I went to the library yesterday: I only came away with two books. I finished reading one of them today: Jeri Laber's The Courage of Strangers, a memoir from one of the founders of Human Rights Watch. It's subtitled, "Coming of Age with the Human Rights Movement," but it really ought to be subtitled, "How a middle-aged Jewish housewife helped to found a major international organization and end Communist rule in Eastern Europe."

The book made me realize how young the human rights movement really is. I mean, intellectually, I'd known that organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International were founded in the late seventies. What I didn't realize was the degree to which human rights wasn't really a major foreign policy issue to many democratic governments until the seventies. Nowadays most government at least pay lip service to human rights, even if they find excuses to support brutal regimes. Back then, the standard line was, "We don't meddle in other countries' internal affairs."

Anyway, it's a neat book, and a wonderful testament to what a group of committed, intelligent people can accomplish, even when they're pretty much making everything up as they go along.

And now I think it's time to go load another batch of laundry. More later!