Lightly Blogging

It’s been a poor week for blogging, and paradoxically a rich week for gathering information, sustenance, passion regeneration.  I’ve been on the east coast, connecting with some old friends and making some new ones.  I’m sitting at a Midwest Express gate hooked into a Comcast loganwifi link - $7.50 for the next hour or so.  I visited the Kennedy Museum and Library on my way to the airport and rediscovered the passion - that word again - that drove us forward into the great programs and policies that lifted us out of the Eisenhower era doldrums and restored luster to government in the sixties.

I find it disheartening that so many of my contemporaries are "libertarians."  People who should know that the only thing the invisible hand gives the poor is a slap in the face are content to ignore the terrible truths surrounding poverty all across the globe.

David Weinberger points to Scalzi’s list of signposts reflecting one’s poverty.  Scalzi’s list is personal, it’s American, it has "$800 cars" up from $50 Fords when I was a kid.  It has indoor plumbing.  A definite upgrade from paper training your youngsters before they’re big enough to handle the outhouse on their own.  It is marred by a single cockroach, but implicit in the roach’s presence is the kitchen wall spotted with them when you turn on the light bone tired from a swing shift.  Scalzi’s list has bread, macaroni and cheese, and Raisin Bran.  It has school lunch programs, high-end trash picking and public education.  It is a North American American list.   The  common experience of the impoverished people elsewhere in the western hemisphere makes USian poverty seem almost genteel.