I’ve been busy, mercifully, with some extra work this summer but hit a dry patch.  So finally getting around to tackling new entries in the hope that I can keep on it a bit more regularly.

This present year has its troughs and peaks between what personally goes on in my life and what is happening in the general events around the world.  I get an idea and develop it in my head, typically in the shower or while I’m doing an errand but then the momentum goes pffffftt!

I get very passionate about mobilizing a bloc of us professionals who have been down-sized to the brink of all hope gone, to get the word out that there is a group who are mostly invisible for reasons we can probably guess at.  As your financial means decline, you become more home-centric, at least while you have a home.  When money is coming in, you’re busy with solving the problems for which you were hired.

Then there’s the culture we still, despite the increased anger, resentment, and outrage at what is happening to people through violence, natural disasters and personal catastrophes like illness or fatal car crashes, push away those thoughts that might be sobering enough for us to question those things we CAN change and shrug it all off with a Polly Anna-ish attitude that it’s part of a great plan and things will change for the better (“I do believe in fairies! I do believe in fairies! I do believe in fairies!”)  So no one wants to really know about you, REALLY.  In the quest for ‘brightsidedness’, as Barbara Ehrenreich so nicely described, it occurs to me that we are LESS empathic than a negative person like I am so often described.  The “brightsiders” want you to stop being a misery guts, not for your own benefit but for theirs, lest you cause them to attract bad shit.

Magical thinking to end homelessness, poverty, loneliness, degraded living?  How about trying something concrete like writing letters, getting involved politically, waking up to what can be done besides putting a sticker on your car.