I have a secret to tell / From my electrical well

I feel like the world's been full of bad news lately. Katrina is simultaneously all I want to read about and everything I want to avoid. I've been distracted and depressed, and I know many of my friends have felt the same. So for those of you who could use some good news in dark times...



I'm about three months pregnant today.

The monochrome fuzzy shapes above are the ultrasound pictures of the fetus that we had done this week. It has a heartbeat, and fingers, and it swims around in the amniotic fluid and does other fetusy stuff. Around March (Lord willin' and the crick don't rise, a phrase which has gained more sinister overtones with recent events) it will turn into a Real Live Baby, and we will be Real Live Parents.

Himself and I are both excited and scared, and I swear I have no idea what all this will do to my life. But I wanted to share the good news with you all, since I have some and it's scarce on the ground these days. As for how I'm doing - I'm coping, I'm very healthy, I'm as well-informed as a shelf-full of books and my many wise friends online and off can make me.

I'll update you all as there are updates to be had - some back entries that I had written as private drafts are now also visible.

The Myth Of The Compassionate Conservative

Bush lifts wage rules for Katrina
President signs executive order allowing contractors to pay below prevailing wage in affected areas.
September 9, 2005: 11:43 AM EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.

Yes, because all those people trying to rebuild their lives as well as their cities needed so much help staying destitute.

The myth of the compassionate conservative is clearly just that - a myth. This Is Not Over puts it beautifully in the essay Here's What Gets Me:

My problem with Bush -- and here, I do indeed address Bush individually, as a guy -- is that during the time that the crisis was developing, from Monday to Friday, he never seemed to experience any actual sense of urgency as a result of the simple fact that people were, minute by minute and hour by hour, dying.

It's so true. I expect my President to give a fuck what happens to Americans. But apparently Bush has a conservation of compassion confused with a compassionate conservatism. His problem is, at its root, a failure of empathy.

Bush (and his cronies) cannot really fathom poverty. If they could understand what it means not to have savings, not to be able to have savings, would he really be trying to "reform" Social Security? If they could understand what it means to work a minimum-wage job, would he really have authorized this wage reduction in the areas where good jobs are most needed? If he really knew that there were have-nots in America, and what they live with, could he possibly have blithely instituted a tax cut that favors the rich and is beggaring social programs for those most in need?

Ignorance is no excuse, particularly not wilful ignorance. But it's clear that the man just doesn't get it. I mean, I'm not poor, and never have been. But that's what empathy is for - to let you feel sympathetic to things that you don't personally experience, to help you understand people who are not Just Like You, to help you realize that there but for the grace of God go we all.

Kirsten Anderberg has an interesting look at past disasters and the effort to create aid separations between the "old poor" and the "new poor" - it's not Katrina-specific, but very relevant. Even in disaster, we differentiate between "hads" and "had-nots" - not accounting for the idea of scarcity in valuing losses.

And as for being poor, I've seen some very moving and thoughtful testaments to what it really means over the past week or so. Required reading: John Scalzi's Being Poor Is... (with some excellent follow-up in the comments), Cadhla's Money for floods: poverty, humanity, and the social contract, and an essay, What is Poverty?, written by Jo Goodwin Parker in 1971. I wish I could sit that awful man in the White House down and make him read all of these. I hope he chokes on his fucking silver spoon.

ETA: A friend linked me to this excellent paper, Losing Ground: Lessons from the Repeal of Nine "Little Davis-Bacon" Acts, out of the University of Utah's econ department. Read the summary, if not the whole thing, to see the actual effects of repealing the prevailing wage. Unsurprisingly, it hurts everyone...except the contractor. And who is the contractor hired for rebuilding in affected areas? Why, I believe it's Halliburton. Funny, that. Only really, really, not.

This is not America

Court Rules U.S. Can Indefinitely Detain Citizens
Ruling Comes in the Case of 'Enemy Combatant' Jose Padilla
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 9, 2005; 12:27 PM

"A federal appeals court ruled today that the president can indefinitely detain a U.S. citizen captured on U.S. soil in the absence of criminal charges, holding that such authority is vital to protect the nation from terrorist attacks."

Holy shit. I can't say that "America never was America to me," because it was, and it has been, despite my cynicism and questioning. Never have I had my faith in that so shaken as I have in these first fledgling years of the 21st century. This is not America.

Katrina & a pointless anecdote.

I still can't stomach what's going on, but I can't stay away from it, either. The press blocked from covering certain aspects of the event. Refugees treated like detainees. Barbara Bush laughing that the hurricane is "working out very well for [survivors in Houston]." Photos of drowned busyards with hundreds of buses that nobody thought to use for evacuation. The constant bullshit drooling out of Washington about what a good job they've done and how finger-pointing isn't productive (my ass it's not). It's even got me distracted from the Supreme Court nomination and hearings processes. Distracted from distraction by distraction, and none of it pleasant. Politics aside, this is one of the more terrifying things I've heard about the lasting impact of Katrina yet.

I can't even link you to everything I've been reading - it's too much, too depressing.

Instead, I will tell you that I dropped my sixty-odd-year-old parents off at the airport at some godawful hour of the morning this morning. They were hopping a plane to Chicago, to hang out for a few days before embarking on an eight-day, 400-mile bike tour of Illinois rivers. I watched their grey heads bob off toward the baggage claim, wheeling large bike boxes, with something like awe. I'm lucky if I can get myself to take a walk around my neighborhood. I can only hope to be that cool when I am a senior citizen. Four hundred miles. Go, Mom and Dad, go!

Conflicted and unconflicted thoughts on recent events.

At the pump yesterday, my mother and I were talking about what people pay attention to. "Good," I said. "I don't care if gas prices are up. We subsidize oil too heavily anyway; we should be paying $4 and $5 a gallon, not driving all over the goddamn place like the resource is unlimited and there's no impact to using it. I hope gas prices stay high until 2008," I said, "Maybe that will convince people to get the Republicans out of office."

And you know, I would pay ten dollars a gallon if I had to, for the next three years, without question, if I thought it would get Bush out of office. The direct connections between his poor choices in Iraq and the magnitude of this latest disaster are sickening. If the pump is what it takes to get people outraged and keep them there, then goddamnit, I'll pay it.

But not everyone can. If you're already living on a tight budget and you need your car to work or get your kids to school, that extra $.25 at the pump can be the difference between getting by and not being able to make ends meet. And it's not fair of me to wish that on them, no matter how much I think we'd all be better off without these morons in power.

Still, my inner cynic wonders how the Republicans will manage to spin this, by the next election. What will they do, to twist and santitize crowds of the dying poor chanting "We need help" and global condemnation of the government's role in the tragedy? You know they'll try. And I've lost faith in the voting public's ability to hear facts and remember truths. Part of me says the only thing that's going to wake people the fuck up is gas gouging.

But how am I any better, if I'm willing to call poor families who can't afford rising pump costs "collateral damage" in a political struggle for supremacy? Any policy that disproportionately harms those who have the least is not something I can wish for, however desirable its other effects might be in the long run.

And though you've likely seen this all elsewhere, some Katrina information:

Places to send charity (and places to avoid) - The FEMA is directing donations to Pat Robertson's right-wing, scandal-ridden Operation Blessing, among others. This list gives you a good picture of the charities that are doing charity work, versus those that are mixing religious strings in with their humanitarian relief.

Also, and this cannot be emphasized enough, please don't earmark your donations for Katrina relief. Most organizations work one disaster ahead, which means that prior general fund donations from the tsunami and other disasters are actually funding humanitarian relief efforts even now. Earmarking money for Katrina can limit its usefulness in this or any other disaster.

Blood donation is also a way to help; I can't give or I'd do it, but maybe you can.

I was going to put together links about my outrage, about the president's bullshit and "we didn't know" and "unacceptable outcomes" and about how ashamed I am of a country that leaves its poor to die of thirst and hunger and then blames them for "looting" when they get supplies any way they can. I was going to try to talk about how the "evacuation plan" only worked if you owned your own transportation, because they shut down the Greyhound on Saturday, about how they've started "evacuating" the Superdome but the numbers keep growing, about how people are being turned away, in Houston, because there is no room at the inn Astrodome, or how Homeland Security is refusing to let international rescue teams into the country. But I am just too angry, and too sad, and too overwhelmed.

I have never been to New Orleans, and I don't know anyone who lives in the area. For me, this is almost as distant as the tsunami disaster. Except that there was relief for the tsunami disaster. Immediate government relief, an outpouring of it, from all over the world. And this is America, and these are Americans, and we have left them to rot as though we are not the country with more resources than any other, as though they were not our own. People are living (and dying) in their own shit and our government is wringing its hands and doing nothing to help. I am so ashamed. I am so ashamed.

Best Husband Ever: a tale of woe with a happy ending.

I am living in a bubble. I hear about Katrina, but I haven't even turned on the television. I have been totally absorbed in me me me and this big Thing that I just wrapped yesterday at work. Today I can barely wake up, though I slept twelve hours last night. I need to give to the Red Cross. I need to store drinking water in the garage. I need to drive to Santa Cruz. I need to return my library books. But I'm having a post-panic schlump, and I can barely think.

See, there was this meeting. A big meeting (for our project, 40-50 people is a big meeting) with people from all over the state, and while I had dribs and drabs of information, I felt like I didn't really know what we were doing at this meeting, which was a Bad Thing, since I was running it. And I didn't feel like I really had a handle on the content or the timeline until maybe last Thursday, when some decisions finally got made, and we almost lost the hotel contract because our business office contact was on vacation, and I was up until the ack emma of the night before frantically doing Powerpoints and notes and handouts, and and and. I was afraid it would look rushed and scrambled and that I would lose all professional cred and really, it wasn't all me; this was the most last-minute thing I've ever been asked to organize.

But there I am, at 9 pm the night before, and Powerpoint crashes (curse you, Microsoft), and I lose an hour or two of work and I have hours of it yet to go, and the printer is out of paper and I have not yet photocopied anything or burned the CDs I need to burn and I just started crying, staring helplessly at my screen. And of course, because when I get stressed out I flail and start getting snippy with people, I'd been fairly awful to my husband all day.

This is a problem with me. I take something I'm not familiar with and I fuss with it for a bit and if it doesn't immediately make sense, I complain that it doesn't work. Or if I get stressed out I decide that it will never get done. Or if I don't know how to do it, I avoid it, even if it might not be too hard to find out how. And I get pissy with people who try to talk me down, or help me out, even though I need to be helped or talked down. Drives my husband nuts, understandably. So Tuesday night I'm crying at my Powerbook and my husband got me to tell him what was wrong (which explanation probably involved a lot of handwaving and liberal use of the word "doom") and then he ignored the fact that I'd been a walking whine factory all day and solved my problems.

He told me how to email all my documents to Kinkos, which saved me three hours of midnight copying. He gave me useful tips on how to make sure they did it right. He set up the printer, he burned my CDs, and it only took me another two hours to finish the documents I needed and get them sent off. Inspired by his problem solving, I asked my director for a bit of help on one more piece that I'd been stuck on, and when she agreed...Oh my God. It was all done. Like a miracle. And I picked up the printed documents in the morning while my director picked up the candy I'd forgotten to buy (we never run meetings without chocolate) and the hotel room/process was not a disaster (Holiday Inn Capitol Plaza in Sacramento, top marks) and the meeting went really, remarkably well.

Some days I am just a walking disaster with a really good support network. It's amazing how much that can make me look like a competent, functioning, human being. I feel very blessed for my husband's patience, knowledge, and creative problem-solving, my director's willingness to crisis-manage me during freakouts (okay, it helps that we are related, probably), and for competent, efficient people at places like the Holiday Inn and Kinkos, who know and do their jobs so that I don't have to.