Subprime, Food Stamps and Iraq 4 Stacks

I came across one of the most moving first person
accounts by Lieut. Sean Walsh on what it means to
lose your people in The Iraq War.

In a lot of ways it reminded me of a d-boy reflecting on life from prison
in the way the Lt. is resigned to his fate. Or perhaps it was the
morose way he spoke about his dead friends. I think that is exactly
what it was. It resonated with me in a way, that I really don't think
I was prepared for. When cats die, we don't mourn them in the 'hood.

We might get mad. We may want revenge or we may
want that person back.

But grieving, publicly is a no no.

Lieut. Walsh writes,

The passing of the 4,000th service member in Iraq is a tragic milestone and a testament to the cost of this war, but for those of us who live and fight in Iraq, we measure that cost in smaller, but much more personal numbers. For me those numbers are 8, the number of friends and classmates killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 3, the number of soldiers from my unit killed in this deployment. I'm 25, yet I've received more notifications for funerals than invitations to weddings.

The number 4,000 is too great to grasp even for us that are here in Iraq. When we soldiers read the newspaper, the latest AP casualty figures are glanced over with the same casual interest as a box score for a sport you don't follow. I am certain that I am not alone when I open up the Stars and Stripes, the military's daily paper, and immediately search for the section with the names of the fallen to see if they include anyone I know. While in a combat outpost in southwest Baghdad, it was in that distinctive bold Arial print in a two-week-old copy of the Stars and Stripes that I read that my best friend had been killed in Afghanistan. No phone call from a mutual friend or a visit to his family. All that had come and gone by the time I had learned about his death. I sometimes wonder, if I hadn't picked up that paper, how much longer I would have gone by without knowing — perhaps another day, perhaps a week or longer until I could find the time and the means to check my e-mail to find my messages unanswered and a death notification from a West Point distro list in my inbox.

Has anyone every studied the similarities of reentering society after returning from a war and reentering society after reentering from prison?

It makes me wonder, as Birkhold has said, "What Does it Mean to be Against
the War?"
On a day to day, what does it mean?

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I found this dope Subprime primer on de.lic.ious almost a month
ago. I have finally gotten around to posting it. Trust me, it will be
the best three minutes you squander on the internet today.

Its almost as subversive as a Simpson episode.

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File this one in "real in the field".
Mother goes from $70K/year job to the food bank.

When she was laid off in February, Patricia Guerrero was making $70,000 a year. Weeks later, with bills piling up and in need of food for her family, this middle-class mother did something she never thought she would do: She went to a food bank.

It was Good Friday, and a woman helping her offered to pay her utility bill.

"It brought tears to my eyes, and I sat there and I cried. I was like, 'This is really where I'm at?' " she told CNN. "I go 'no way;' [but] this is true. This is reality. This is the stuff you see on TV. It was hard. It was very hard."

When I read this story, I couldn't help but think, where are the
other people who are suffering like this? There has to be tens
of thousands of them that are currently experiencing the
financial fragility that the working class and sub working class
experience on the daily. Where are their stories?

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Food stamp usage is the highest it has been since
the program was started.

Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.

The number of recipients, who must have near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits averaging $100 a month per family member, has fluctuated over the years along with economic conditions, eligibility rules, enlistment drives and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which led to a spike in the South.

But recent rises in many states appear to be resulting mainly from the economic slowdown, officials and experts say, as well as inflation in prices of basic goods that leave more families feeling pinched. Citing expected growth in unemployment, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected a continued increase in the monthly number of recipients in the next fiscal year, starting Oct. 1 — to 28 million, up from 27.8 million in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2007.

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That testimony by Lt. Walsh was unbelievably moving.

You got anyone in the war?

Why aren't the similarities between post prison
and post war drawn on the regular?

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