I can’t describe how I felt reading the following. It was overwhelming.

John Scalzi shared in “Being Poor” a list describing what it is like. An instant community sprung up of folks who could relate, and shared points of their own, including myself. Here are a few (make sure to read his post and comments):

Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.

Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

Being poor is seeing how few options you have.

Being poor is running in place.

Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.

Here goes a few I contributed to the conversation:

Being poor is pausing to answer when someone asks, “what do you parents do for a living?”

Being poor is pausing to answer when someone asks, “where is your father?”

Being poor is waiting on Christmas morning for the Salvation Army Santa Claus to visit.

Being poor is believing that a happy, healthy family is a TV fantasy.

Being poor is thinking “I’m going to die before I’m 30 anyway”.

Being poor is finally getting a decent job, and it turns out it is in the burbs, which requires you to get a car, that you can’t pay for.

Being poor is finally getting a credit card, and it’s at 21% interest.

Being poor is finally getting a decent job, which requires dropping state insurance, which means your children will go uninsured.

Being poor means working a job 40 hours for 10 weeks and 36 hours for 2 – so that the employer can dodge paying full time benefits.

Being poor is having your nose broken, not having health insurance, and living with the cosmetic change the rest of your life.

I believe that big problems can quickly overwhelm if not broken down into smaller, achievable tasks. Sometimes they look so big as to be intractable – unchangeable. I tend to believe that if each of us do what we can – using the expertise, experience and skills we have – within our own spheres of influence – to effect small change here – small change there – well we can make a difference in a very big way.

Read Dave Rogers’s questioning and powerful piece: Change.

I can’t help it – in the face of all this – I remain an optimist. A believer that things can change. And that those changes happen with very small, and sometimes seemingly unrelated, steps.

Keep your chin up.

Richelle held a hell of a barbecue for me at my place for my 33rd birthday this Saturday (my birthday was Sunday). I am a blessed man. My growing family was there (welcome Cindy!). Friends I have made online, friends from work, and life long friends – who have known me from high school – were in attendence. Not everyone was there – but old relationships go thru their stages ya know. But for those that were – well we had a good time.

It started 3PM in the afternoon and went on till 3AM in the morning. Although, by that time, I was paying the price for getting very, very drunk. Probably as bad as my bachelor party. The meaning of this week, I think, in the back of my mind.

Katrina, like 9/11 before it, leaves you faced with the fact that time is very, very precious. Just a little needs to pass – and everything can change. How we spend it means everything.

After 9/11 I walked away from weblogging. I walked away from Philly Future. I devoted myself to spending more time with my family, more time with my friends. Bringing Philly Future back online, and seeing it grow as successfully as it has – well it brings everything around full circle. How am I spending my time? Is it being spent wisely?

The following links are of folks in my sphere of work that are doing things to help in the wake of Katrina:

Jeff Jarvis: Recovery 2.0

Doc Searls: Power to the People

Dave Winer: “It’s 2005, we have mastered the technology, now let’s deploy it”

Mike Watkins: Suggestion: Don’t write one line of code, not one XML spec, until you’ve worked a week in a Red Cross call center on family reunification tasks.

Boing Boing: Tech pros ask: how can we help with Katrina recovery?, Katrina aid idea: create cybercafe/free voip phone center at Astrodome?, Katrina tech aid ideas, continued

What is “the Mantra”? A set of words sprouted by those in government to deny or direct away responsibility. As Susie Madrak points out, it’s spreading:

I was watching MSNBC last night and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is now repeating the BushCo mantra: Faith-based groups, neighbors helping neighbors, government being “too big and too slow” to really help people, etc.

I made a terrible bet with some folks last week – that the Bush Administration will use similar language – while blaming local incompetence – and making grand photo ops – to get an approval ratings spike or bump by ten points. It sounds crazy, but I don’t think so. We shall see.

And hey – if you think that’s cynical – check out what Barbara Bush said in Texas when faced with so many displaced human beings in the Astrodome: “so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.” (via Atrios)

Cold, callus, and calculating. Think that quote will get much play in today’s news? Doubt it. Way too revealing. The Bush family has always been masterful at playing the media like a fiddle. Then again there are signs that broadcast media is waking up. Let’s hope so.

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It took a massive disaster to reveal it – but now it’s visible for the world to see – underneath the shiney surface of America is growing population of those in such poverty that they had little means to avoid the disaster coming their way and to react afterwards: The Times Online: From the murky water of doubt emerges an uncomfortable truth:

It isn’t the failure to act in New Orleans that is the story here, it’s the sheer, uninsured, uncared for, self-disenfranchised scale of the poverty that lies revealed. It looks like a scene from the Third World because that’s the truth.

After 9/11 we had hoped the reorganization of homeland security departments (FEMA, FBI, and others) would help the country be more secure. By far, it doesn’t look like the case. The response to Katrina was unacceptably slow. We maybe worst off for the reorganization that has took place. Did you know that “Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died. (Metafilter). Me neither. But it goes to show you that planning can make a difference.

A roundup of writings that caught my eye yesterday:

Jeneane Sessum: “We didn’t understand the magnitude…. Help is on the way.” ON THE WAY? It’s Past too late.

From Suburban Guerrilla – a NYTimes editorial: “Life in the Bottom 80 Percent”: When President Bush talks about the economy, he invariably boasts about good economic growth. But he doesn’t acknowledge what is apparent from the census figures: as the very rich get even richer, their gains can mask the stagnation and deterioration at less lofty income levels….When Congress returns from its monthlong summer vacation next week, two of the leadership’s top priorities include renewing the push to repeal the estate tax, which affects only the wealthiest of families, and extending the tax cuts for investment income, which flow largely to the richest Americans. At the other end of the spectrum, lawmakers have stubbornly refused to raise the minimum wage: $5.15 an hour since 1997. They will also be taking up proposals for deep budget cuts in programs that ameliorate income inequality, like Medicaid, food stamps and federal student loans. They should be ashamed of themselves.

rc3.org: What this really illustrates is the cost of bad government. … Beyond mere partisanship, the most important thing is to elect responsible adults who can and will solve problems. That capability seems to be missing these days.

Anderson Cooper and Jack Cafferty show CNN still has some integrity left. Wow.

Jeff Jarvis: The convention center in New Orleans is a symbol of shame. How can we not figure out how to get water there? Babies are starving. People are dying. There is no authority; police have pulled back to defend their own stations or, according to CNN, deserted their posts. Authorities — from Bush down to cabinet officials down to legislators down to state officials down to the soon-to-be-former-mayor down to those police — have failed these people.

Sidney Blumenthal:In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Trapped in the Superdome:A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered the restroom. Blood stains the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers. The Louisiana Superdome, once a mighty testament to architecture and ingenuity, became the biggest storm shelter in New Orleans the day before Katrina’s arrival Monday. About 16,000 people eventually settled in. Within two days, it had degenerated into unspeakable hole.

CNN’s Jim Spellman: The convention center is a place that people were told to go to because it would be safe. In fact, it is a scene of anarchy. There is absolutely nobody in control. There is no National Guard, no police, no information to be had. The convention center is next to the Mississippi River. Many people who are sleeping there feel that a boat is going to come and get them. Or they think a bus is going to come. But no buses have come. No boats have come. They think water is going come. No water has come. And they have no food. As we drove by, people screamed out to us — “Do you have water? Do you have food? Do you have any information for us?” We had none of those. Probably the most disturbing thing is that people at the convention center are starting to pass away and there is simply nothing to do with their bodies.

Boing Boing: Tech pros ask: how can we help with Katrina recovery?

Shelley Powers: The city is destroyed. Well, now, I take exception to that one. You can’t destroy a city unless you kill off every last one of the people who live in and love the city. You would also have to remove every reference to it in history, and all of its culture, and every last bit of influence it has ever had in the past, present, and we presume, future.

This post is inspired by one at Eschaton. What I’m about to share is both private and painful.

I don’t want to politicize Katrina – but there are too many Right wingers already doing that – so it’s time to speak up.

More than likely my family would not have survived, if we were in the same circumstances we were when I was a kid – and been in New Orleans the day Katrina hit.

I don’t talk much about growing up – my childhood – because many would not understand. Some would make incorrect judgments. Others would look down on me. Some would take pity. I’ve never wanted any of that. Never asked for any of that. And I am proud to have made it to where I am pulling up my own bootstraps.

But as a kid – me and my family lived Social Security check to Social Security check. It would get to us on the 1st of the month. Each month the 1st was a happy day. But as the month wore on – there would be less and less of everything – including food.

Katrina hit on the 29th. We would not have had cash to leave town. We would not have had cash for public transportation. We would not have had cash for food. We would not have had cash for water.

Since we moved so often, and knew no neighbors – our choice would be stark: to give up and die – or be among those foraging for food – “lootersâ€? to you hate mongers – and treking our way out of town. I think the later. Because we’re fighters.

My family survived the circumstances of our childhood poverty. But for those poor in Katrina’s wake – who the Right is vilifying with a broad brush – their nightmare goes on.

I hope no one in my family is upset I posted this. When I got reminded about the 29th of the month… I had to share. My heart is heavy for those who have been hit – and those who are fighting to survive.

Albert has a great set of charities for donations. Pick one and donate.

Oh, and as for the President, well I expect his approval ratings to jump back to normal when he lands in New Orleans. It won’t mean *anything* for those in the thick of it however. Won’t mean a damn thing.

See The Tattered Coat’s list. Donate today.