First I thought we got hacked.  Then I realized...

From the New Yorker:  Betrayed, by George Packer.

Link to the Article

This article is a(nother) heartbreaking story about the lives our President has destroyed; this time, it is Iraqis that have risked everything to assist the US Government's efforts.

Fair Use excerpts and an audio link after the break...

Well, I did it.

At YearlyKos, I dropped my slip of paper in the box with a commitment written on it...one I would carry through.

This week I attended the Benton County Democratic Committee meeting.  It was everything I knew (feared?) it would be, but I left heartened.

The area I live in has a long and strong history of unionism with a history of the railroad and the construction trades that built the facilities that produced the first weapons-grade plutonium in the world.   That same history has blended in a conservative/ fundamentalist side that arises from the strong sense of pride of what the community contributed to the winning of the Cold War.  For example, we go through a rite every couple of years about the mascot of one of the local high schools, the Bombers...and yeah, the symbol is of a smoking gun, er, atom bomb.  Lots of yellow ribbions here and the occasional "love it or leave it" spam email that plagues most offices.

St Peter, doncha call me 'cause I can't go,
I owe my soul to the company store.

Merle Travis, Sixteen Tons

Before I trained to be an engineer, I was a social worker.  We talked a lot about Maslow's Hieracrchy of Needs because we were trying to enrich the lives of older people in crisis; get them past the crisis and back on track.  Along with getting them "back to normal," we tried to find ways to engage them in some sort of activity to express themselves.

I wrote a comment on another diary this week about how the Republicans were actually forcing people down the levels of the Hierarchy of Needs, which resulted in Americans asking for less and less and worrying more and more about basic needs like food, energy, jobs and relationships.  A discussion follows after the break.

I've been thinking about human rights.  Being white and middle class, I don't have any real first-hand experience of discrimination, but I've seen it.

I grew up in tiny communities along the Snake River in Idaho and Oregon; my dad was a power operator for Idaho Power which had dams up and down the Snake.  Typically, there would be a small village with company-built houses, anywhere from five to fifty miles to the nearest town.  I knew no one that was a different color than I, except the "Mexican" migrant workers that worked the fields in the Treasure Valley, the area that stretched from Ontario, Oregon to Boise, Idaho.  A verdant area, thanks to the irrigation projects that the federal government subsidized starting in the Thirties, acres and acres of potatoes, onions, and sugar beets were planted, weeded and harvested every year by those brown hands.

I've been thinking about the issue of reproductive rights.

I was born in 1953, the first born of a 16 year old mom and her terrified 18 year old husband.  Yep, they had to get married because of the pregnancy, but after all, it was a family tradition: my grandma was 32 years old when I was born.

The family story is a thread that many families are familiar with:  young parents, disapproving parents, minimum wage jobs, sleeping in cardboard boxes instead of cribs...when I share my family's experience, I often see other heads nodding in remembrance, kinship.  This story isn't so rare.  There weren't that many options in the 1950's.  Or the 40's..or the 30's...it IS an old story.

For all that, I grew up loved and happy, a bright eldest daughter that was a good example to her two younger siblings; a brother thirteen months younger (family tradition has it as a burst condom) and my dear little sister, five years younger, the zygote that even a late 50's IUD couldn't dislodge.