And the meetings. Have I mentioned the meetings? All of us are feeling like we are working two full time jobs these days – it turns out revolutions require lots of meetings, here in the Midwest.

But everyone I know – and I mean everyone – has added 5 – 10 hours a week of volunteer political activism. It’s exhausting. Our houses are a mess. We serve frozen pizza for dinner. We don’t do laundry unless that red Solidarity T-Shirt is starting to smell funky.

But we are engaged and inspired so we protest and march and canvass and yes….go to one more meeting….

We have to put defense spending on the table in a serious way in addition to raising the income level for medicare contributions and removing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.

I don’t understand how the Republicans have sold their story to the middle classes – but it seems that the Democrats are not offering a story at all. The non-affluent middle class will have to make common cause with the poor to make any difference.

(Also, I think it’s pretty clear that attacks on abortion rights and women’s health services ARE part of the war on the poor, since most of us lovely middle-class progressives will still have the social capital and financial wherewithal to access what we need when we need it.)

And I haven’t done anything, because I don’t know what to do. I’m represented now by a conservative democrat and a seriously conservative republican. Like they’re going to listen to me. Sigh.

There’s a pastor on my feed burner who quoted someone last week, a commenter on a blog he reads, to the effect of, we get caught up in red vs. blue all the time, and that’s deliberate, because it distracts us from the fact that actually, it’s about rich vs. poor.

it is still very cold in northern japan — we were in the north about a year ago, and there was plenty of snow. so much infrastructure is out — trains, roads, electric power. other kinds of fuel — people still use kerosene heaters many places — are in short supply.

I threw an initial donation at Oxfam, because it looked like they were partnering with local groups who serve particularly vulnerable populations (including nursing mothers). My next one will probably go to Second Harvest Japan.

But I’m still making monthly donations to Partners in Health, based on the assumption that the need in Haiti (and Rwanda, and the other places PiH serves) remains at crisis levels. Which should surprise no one, since the need in Haiti was at crisis levels even before the earthquake struck.

(If we’re freaking out about medical-test radiation, can we take a minute to freak out about mammograms? Radiation amounts comparable to a CT scan, and aimed at the same body part once a year every year for decades! What a fabulous idea!)