{"id":14204,"date":"2013-03-11T06:03:23","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T10:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=14204"},"modified":"2013-03-02T16:26:14","modified_gmt":"2013-03-02T21:26:14","slug":"5-years-ago-all-she-wants-to-do-is-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/03\/11\/5-years-ago-all-she-wants-to-do-is-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"5 years ago: All She Wants to Do Is Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>March 11, 2008, on this blog: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2008\/03\/11\/all-she-wants-t\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>All She Wants to Do Is Dance<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<blockquote><p>That initial description of Abbas in her leopard-print tops and oversized jewelry reminded me of several larger-than-life women I have known \u2014 people of whom I\u2019m enormously fond for their love of life and their cheerfully boisterous insistence that the world deal with them on their own terms. But as courageous in their own way as those women are, none of them lives in a place like Baghdad. None of them drove a van full of schoolchildren every day while living under Saddam\u2019s dictatorship and then <em>kept driving<\/em> through the chaos of invasion, of a bungled occupation and civil war.<\/p>\n<p>Azhar Abbas is awesome.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Azhar Abbas, in her leopard-print tops and oversized jewelry, drove a van full of schoolchildren every day while living under Saddam\u2019s dictatorship and then kept driving through the chaos of invasion, of a bungled occupation and civil war. Azhar Abbas is awesome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>5 years ago: All She Wants to Do Is Dance<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Azhar Abbas, in her leopard-print tops and oversized jewelry, drove a van full of schoolchildren every day while living under Saddam\u2019s dictatorship and then kept driving through the chaos of invasion, of a bungled occupation and civil war. Azhar Abbas is awesome.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/03\/11\/5-years-ago-all-she-wants-to-do-is-dance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"5 years ago: All She Wants to Do Is Dance\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Azhar Abbas, in her leopard-print tops and oversized jewelry, drove a van full of schoolchildren every day while living under Saddam\u2019s dictatorship and then kept driving through the chaos of invasion, of a bungled occupation and civil war. Azhar Abbas is awesome.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/03\/11\/5-years-ago-all-she-wants-to-do-is-dance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"slacktivist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-03-11T10:03:23+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2013-03-02T21:26:14+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"1 minute\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/03\/11\/5-years-ago-all-she-wants-to-do-is-dance\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/03\/11\/5-years-ago-all-she-wants-to-do-is-dance\/\",\"name\":\"5 years ago: All She Wants to Do Is Dance\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2013-03-11T10:03:23+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2013-03-02T21:26:14+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\"},\"description\":\"Azhar Abbas, in her leopard-print tops and oversized jewelry, drove a van full of schoolchildren every day while living under Saddam\u2019s dictatorship and then kept driving through the chaos of invasion, of a bungled occupation and civil war. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"5 years ago: All She Wants to Do Is Dance","description":"Azhar Abbas, in her leopard-print tops and oversized jewelry, drove a van full of schoolchildren every day while living under Saddam\u2019s dictatorship and then kept driving through the chaos of invasion, of a bungled occupation and civil war. 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