This will sound like a pebble in an ocean, a whisper in a rainstorm but I must ask you what is your guiding star? Are you pulled by politic or principle? It is a struggle, pushing you toward both ends. I know your need, your hunger for something more no matter your method, no matter your tone. Politics needs passion, it feeds upon it, draining us of our hopes, our dreams, leaving only a shell of apathy and dissent. And yet we open our veins to its jagged teeth, and yet we bare our souls to a maddening process certain to disappoint and mangle.

We are the romantics that dream of a better world, those that fight for the rights of ourselves and those around us. We are Democrats, we are Republicans, we are Independents, and we are Other. Soldiers all fighting in the same war on the same side. Soldiers following our lesser natures while engaging in bickering and posturing, impuning our brothers and sisters over petty disagreements for hollow pride in the name of “politics“, not fighting for our country but toward its unraveling .

We ought to be better, we ought to stand together and not splinter upon the burden of tiny fractures. Our cause seems unified but not our spirit, and I am bewildered by this, and I am guilty of this as much as you, if not more-my sins confessed and repented for, my behavior no doubt poised to repeat its devilish ways because we cannot be perfect but we can, with relative ease be better by adhering to our principles.

We can seek out intelligence and bravery in our elected leaders, choosing from within us the best of us to rediscover the lost art of leadership. We can respect and acknowledge the sheer patriotism that is ingrained in any person that throws body to the flames and spikes of this process, this pastime, and we can work to disavow any knowledge of those that would split our ranks for the sake of their own selfish feasts, damning not just our better angels to places of darkness but our nation to the ranks of the listless and bare. Salvation can come to those who battle not with fists and fiery rhetoric but who exercise restraint, compassion, and allow themselves the splendor of an open mind.

He’s one. One story, one splintered bit of something that used to feel whole, solid, and limitless. Futures fade faster these days and a regular guy with a strong work ethic, the kind of guy that used to find success, find a place in this country now stands on the slippery edge.

Its all necessity now, no corners left to cut. Daily calculations minus every dime and dollar from a dwindling pot down to zero while some things fall by the way side. And like that a credit report can be destroyed, and like that a house can hang by a thread, this is how someone becomes homeless, this is how good people stop paying their bills.

It’s been almost three years for him, three years of interviews and rejections, of struggle, depression, tears, and at times laughter because sometimes there’s nothing else. He’s been made harder by this ordeal, an easy smile not as quick to appear, fading fast, drowned by the anxiety that comes rushing in.

In September of 2007 it was the layoff, not unexpected after months of cutbacks. “Three months tops” he told his wife, reassuring her that he would have a job in three months. But nobody expected a downturn to turn into a crater, crushing millions of jobs, millions of lives just like his.

He was sick a few months later, his arms and legs heavy, heavier everyday while his lips lazily moved to form words that had previously seemed effortless. A little while later he was on temporary disability, this treatment and that chipping away at the disease, bringing him back but not all the way back, not sick enough to be considered disabled but not well enough to work without limitations as he always had before.

Still resumes went out, via email, in person, through the mail. More then a thousand, but less then ten thousand he estimates, with call backs and interviews few and far between. There were glimmers though, the job he had interviewed for prior to getting sick calling to offer him a job that he was more then capable of doing with only minor accomodations, their enthusiasm for him slowly sliding away as he asked for a downstairs desk due to his inability to climb stairs, “we never did hear back from them“ his wife says.

It was in the Spring of last year when the nightmare descended further down into the black and thorny, something they had feared ever since he had lost his job, his wife had lost hers. “It was like our emergency shoot ripped while we were falling” she says.

They sit now in their living room, those objects people often find solace in sold off to pay their bills and keep their house. His benefits have run out now, hers not enough for two people to get by one. Their COBRA subsidy ends soon with his medical bills still faithfully coming in, “almost daily, something, a phone call and then a threatening letter. We tell them we have nothing they tell us to borrow from our friends and family.” she recounts, a pile of bills maybe three inches thick in her hands.

Family has helped, a little here a little there but their not from the kind of folks that have much extra. They’ll get private insurance when their COBRA runs out, a little more money and a lot less coverage. They have no answer, no plan for when their modest savings account runs out, no idea what they can do that they haven’t done already in pursuit of work. “We have optimism” she says, “but not much.”

They are nameless and faceless in this piece because they don’t wish to advertise, because they feel it will pose a disadvantage to them in their pursuit of work if people know about their full struggle. They don’t want pity and they don’t want charity, they just want to keep floating, keep surviving.

They aren’t unique, no different then so many others. All lost in the anonymity of large numbers. Abandoned by the press and the politicians with their hollow and offensive pledges of allegiance and concern. But in that living room they are real, lives built up over time now torn, piece by piece by circumstances beyond their control. Its that kind of tragedy repeated over and over in this country that should shame us for allowing an absence of dialogue, resource, and intervention at a time when “optimism” dies, and lives like theirs fade away to smoke.

The paint that conveys tragedy, horror, destruction, and mayhem has become diluted from over use. A terrorist isn’t just someone who slams a plane into a building, someone who straps a bomb to their chest before boarding a bus. Now a terrorist is a kid that sets off a cherry bomb in a locker. Nazi, Fascist, Communist, all tossed around to describe politicians with no regard for the hard birth, the bloody origin of those words. Athletes, pop stars, and people famous for being famous now hold high the moniker of “hero”, sullied and weightless in contrast to its past.

Our tedious dramas that rise to mythical proportions, spread to the world by way of our self indulgent and unimaginative use of communications technology and our short fuse attention span. All guilty, all responsible for this sharp turn in our evolution. And now in the midst of yet another disaster, one that momentarily shakes us from the slumber of our typical distractions, allowing our humanity and compassion to rise to the surface we know, we must know that something will come soon to carry away our attention, lulling us back to sleep.

It is necessity, born out of the ever growing thirst for content, for news. Always feeding the beast, always ignoring the developments of yesterdays story in the interest of servicing tomorrows. Its nothing new, but its nothing good. The people of the Gulf know that soon the glare of the media will recede, our attention will wane, and our Government will find something new to fixate on. They know because “Katrina” disabused them of any contrary notion, eliminated in them the dream that help would not just come but remain until the job was done. They are on their own, a cause in need of unity adrift in a nation of individuals.

And if you think I’m being overly cynical, or inaccurate answer me this: Where was the sustained outcry of those marooned in modern age shanty towns, made up of lines and lines of trailers set down in a field, left lawless, preyed upon by drugs and crime after Katrina? Where is the ongoing, public effort, loud and unrelenting to help the relief workers who with bare hands and un-masked faces dug bit by bit to rescue and retrieve the wounded and fallen on 9/11? Even today they suffer crippling injury and illness, but they suffer it mostly in silence because no one tells that story.

We’ve got two wars in progress, an economic crisis still stepping on the throat of the under and unemployed, a Government that Left or Right ranges from worthless to absurd and we live in an age of animalistic cruelty. An era of religious fanaticism that is intellectually hazardous here and physically dangerous abroad. Bodies with no hearts found in Mexican mass graves due to the drug wars. Haiti is still a pile of rubble and ash not fixed by a star studded telethon or promises of relief and piles of dollars that have begun to diminish. In the Congo anywhere from 3 million to 7.8 million men, women, and children have died during a war that burns like an endless fire, with enough blood spilt to fill an ocean.

Yet in a world gone utterly mad, a world filled with unrelenting evil and pain we focus on our reality TV, our gossip, our fast food, our slave labor goods, blood diamonds, video games that take us to another world of fantasy or slanted reality. All in an effort it seems to run away from the screams, the tears, and the torture of our actual lives and the world around us. A world on full display to anyone who dares look, a world made small by our technology, thus robbing us of our ignorance but still allowing us and at times encouraging our apathy.

These are as much my sins as they are no doubt yours. But in this world, where there is good, where there is hope almost solely by the grace of those who rise when others fall, and stay standing while others collapse into a saccharine safe bed of permanent ease let us at least acknowledge these failings and reconcile that we have the capacity to be improved. Let us admit that while we have the opportunity to make better the wicked ways of this world, even the hope and want to do so, that when given a choice of the narrow and rickety, the rocky and hazardous yet righteous or the path of ease and comfort, of self over society, that we chose the latter. Let us pretend no more to be engaged, thoughtful beings that truly care, a silly and brief display betrayed by our typical actions. Let us do that or let us truly change, beating back a history that says no, a mindset that scatters when it should galvanize. Let us seek out our best nature, soaring towards our lofty hopes. Because in this world of good and bad, black and white-we spend to much time remarking on the struggle without entering the fray, occupying the middle, spending to much time in the fucking gray. ?