Common wisdom says that folks in this country can work hard, keep their noses clean and sooner or later they will "make it" through their sheer effort alone. While this assessment works out occasionally, it is not the prevailing reality for millions of poor people who understand generational poverty.

People who will protest my judgment here simply don't understand all of the forces that conspire against the urban poor. The factors that work counter to breakthroughs for low-income Americans are legion. Some relate to public policy, be it educational opportunities, enhanced skills training, health care, decent and affordable housing, access to higher education... the list goes on and on.

For all of those who think that in these bad times there is no good news;
For everyone who thinks that our country's economic crisis is something too big to get their arms around;
For everyone who think that generosity is something that no one can afford, take a look at this!
And for the record: I'm proud it happened in Dallas!

Several weeks ago, back in the summer, I received the following message from a young pastor who leads a new, young church in an undisclosed urban area. He wants to lead his congregation in reaching out to the poor. He really wants his group to be committed to engaging the realities of urban poverty, including homelessness and extreme poverty.

UPDATE: CNN Picked up this story on iReport. Its on the lower right hand corner of CNN.com and the video on iReport is here.

We've said it before and we'll say it again... its the best way on the best day. Best way because its face to face communication with voters, and its the best day because its the day when people expect strangers to come to their door, knock on them, and ask for something. This year, don't just ask for candy, ask for votes!

This month I have had several moments I'm very proud of.

The first one came when one of my friends IM'd to ask me to send some of the pictures I'd taken of the Chemistry Camp our kids attend with her each spring. After I sent her the pictures, she explained why she needed them. She had been chosen as one of the 100 women for the White House Leadership Project.

A couple of weeks later...

...voila! The picture I'd taken ended up in "O" Magazine, along with a great article on my friend, Jennifer Stimpson, explaining her chemistry program.

Not long after, I was asked to write an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News. It was published this past Monday, drawing a variety of positive and negative comments.

Then, earlier this week my friend, Shawn Williams (who blogs at Dallas South) asked me to be a guest on his Blog Talk Radio segment. You can listen to us talk a little about my life in South Dallas, a little commentary on the op-ed I wrote, and my thoughts and observations about the political candidates and campaigns and how I feel they have affected rural America by clicking here.

It's been a busy month... but very productive and fun. Are we really already in November???

This is the best that the Yes on Prop 8 folks can do? Breaking someone else's toys?

The Republican attack on ACORN, the community organizing group, has accelerated dramatically in the last few weeks, with John McCain, Sarah Palin, conservative columnists and bloggers, and right-wing TV and radio talk show hosts all joining in the anti-ACORN chorus. Among other assaults, they have been scapegoating ACORN for Wall Street's disastrous lending spree. As Peter Dreier and I reveal in our article, "The GOP's Blame-ACORN Game," which appears in the November 10 issue of The Nation and also on-line, the accusations are completely bogus. The campaign against ACORN has gotten traction because the conservative echo chamber has been effective at injecting their views into the mainstream, especially since McCain and Palin have jumped on the anti-ACORN bandwagon.

This is my first blog post. And I'm a bit nervous.

I've always recognized the importance of blogging for organizations and campaigns -- it's hugely powerful as a mechanism to connect with an audience and invite them into a conversation. I've always been hesitant to blog myself, though -- I have too many examples of good blogs and bloggers around me to pretend that I have something profound to say. However, there are just too many things going on in the country now to no longer speak out. And this blog is the mechanism I have at my disposal. So I'm using this blog entry -- my first -- to talk about one of the most core pieces of who I am...and how it's about to be taken away.

California has a ballot proposal on the table right now to remove the right of same-sex couples to marry. I know that most of the country sees this as a Californian issue -- for many of my friends on the East Coast, it's difficult to really personalize the issue. I've gotten involved with the issue politically and believe in the right for anyone to marry, so long as they're consenting adults. But it was today that I cried about this fight.

My wife and I are Bible-believing Christians and registered Republicans. This year we will vote for Barack Obama, and we encourage others to do so, too.

The American electorate has come to believe that Bible-believing Christians should vote for Republicans automatically, especially for national offices. I nowadays only rarely find a Republican for whom I can vote – not because I am a Democrat, but because I am a Christian. The present alliance between the political and the religious right has encouraged the belief that to be a Christian is to support policies that openly favor and protect the rich at the expense of the poor, as well as policies that favor military intervention over efforts to find peaceful solutions. Present-day priorities are revealed starkly by our comparative spending for making war, on the one hand, and for guaranteeing an opportunity for the pursuit of happiness or at least the relief of human suffering, on the other. As Republican President Eisenhower once said,

I voted to abolish the office of the president in 1984, a write-in of course. My "candidate" did not win, and I gave up on the enterprise of voting. The intervening 24 years found this committed anarchist eschewing the polling place in favor of direct action.

Politics for me are local. I altered my own communities. Most notably, I decentralized the decision-making in the classroom and the debate squad room, willingly giving up the authority bestowed upon me as teacher and coach.

Frequently ignored, rural voters are sometimes the most insistent. Rural youth, are just as dedicated to policies that can make their lives better. In Oklahoma youth have a solid idea of how issues impact their world. Unique to their area, the environment has a larger impact on their lives than that of urban America.

"In my town, if the river's high, everybody knows it. If the river's dirty, everyone knows about it," young voter Dale Denwalt says.

Kyle Meade is a second generation American whose grandparents came from Mexico. He attacks Republican Tyler Trammell on his assumption that immigration will force Americans into a Mexican culture. Meade says he's living proof that those stereotypes aren't true.

See what they think at the Rural Roundtable...

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the good from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose,

The Law demands that we atone
When we take things we don't own
But leave the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine,

The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the Law to break;
This must be so, but they endure
Those who conspire to make the Law.

The Law locks up the man or woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common flock
Till they go and steal it back.

--- English folk poem, circa 1764

I witnessed something very interesting today. I attended a 'Town Hall' meeting with some of the formerly homeless in our Destination Home program. It basically was an effort on behalf of our staff to touch bases with the residents to review the terms of their lease and, with representatives of the apartment complex owners present, see if they had any problems that needed to be addressed. Most of these residents had been in the program for a year, some for a little less.

Adam, one of the case managers was talking to them about their 'life plans', goals for each one of the residents which the case managers help them achieve as they move towards self sufficiency.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Coit Tower, one of the great landmarks of the city of San Francisco. Coit Tower is a frequent tourist attraction that offers a breathtaking view of San Francisco and the Bay. Within its walls are a series of murals created by 26 different artists during the 1930s. These murals depict many of the struggles that working class people were going through during that time. It came at a time when the San Francisco art scene began to develop its distinctive personality, one that reflected the multicultural diversity of the city by the bay.

Young man, just a lad,
growin' up in a swamp of pain -
poverty so hard, so raw,
stumblin' just part of every day
you live.

Young boy, puttin' on
that smile - unforgettable glow
makin' me wonder what you got
to keep your feet in all this and not quite
fall today.

My buddy in Memphis, Justin, sent me this YouTube from The Work of the People. The title, "What is poverty?" The answer will surprise many. The answer stands at the heart of what we have learned here in Dallas over the past almost 15 years. What makes people poor? Consider your answer before you watch.

It seems that the Democrats have been sucked into letting the last week of the election be about the horse race aspects of the campaigns for President, House and Senate. All the blogs and news sites are talking about are the "numbers": how big a win for Obama, how many takeaways from the R's in the House, how close the D's will get to filibuster-proof in the Senate.

Where is the message? How about talking about we need a big win to put the vested interests back into their cages? How about telling the voters, in a cohesive, comprehensive, cogent way that when three of the four possible partisan permutations (D President w/R Congress, R President w/R Congress, R President w/D Congress) have failed and brought us to the brink of economic, environmental and extra-territorial cataclysm, the only real choice is the fourth and final combination, Democrat President, Democrat Congress? How about we tell the voters that if they want a broken system fixed, we need to install new parts?

People are not going to give us the majorities we crave just to be with a winner: we have to show them how they get to be the winners by making us the winners.

It’s always difficult for an individual to go against a group of people. We all want to get along and be liked by people, so we often keep quiet about opinions when we’re with a group of friends or family members who may not agree. I learned the hard way that keeping quiet about one’s opinions and allowing other people to think for me does long term harm to myself. I’ve been very interested in learning about the dynamics of groupthink, the tendency of a group to limit independent thinking and questioning in the quest for consensus and group cohesiveness. The dangers of groupthink are numerous, from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, China during the Cultural Revolution or in the McCarthy era in America in the 1950s. While it is good to find a community where one can find love and acceptance, it’s also important to be able to speak for oneself and to be able to think independently.

Senator Obama currently leads in newspaper endorsements over Senator McCain by a 2 - 1 margin. While it's tough to figure out how endorsements affect election results, there is evidence that in close elections, undecided voters may be influenced by the opinion pieces.

There are two endorsements that I find interesting, one from the Anchorage Daily News, the other from the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World. Both papers represent states with a "favorite son/daughter" but decided to go in the opposite direction. This is not surprising, as the editorial content of both generally does not favor the candidates' respective parties. The Journal-World, in particular, is an old school conservative stalwart, a home town newspaper that remains controlled by a local family that does not shy away from its parochial, paternalistic, and patriarchal heritage. That said, here are the highlights from their endorsements:

I believe that life begins at conception, that a woman has no right to end that life just because it is in and depends on her body, that life is sacred, and that life is a gift of God. It is precisely because I believe these things that I will be voting on November 4 for Barack Obama.

My reasoning is as follows. Life is a seamless whole, beginning with conception, and ending on this earth with death. Morally, we cannot allow this life after it has been born to be tortured, to be bombed to smithereens, to live hungry, to have inadequate health care, to receive little or no education, to be the victim of crime and neglect. Yet under the current administration too much of this moral outrage has taken place. We are engaged in two wars both of which have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and have left both countries devastated and filled with suffering and bitterness, but after six years of this horror, Osama bin Ladin and Al Qaeda are still alive and flourishing, our economy is down the toilet, over fifty million Americans are without health care insurance, we have engaged in torture, our first amendment rights have been compromised, the unemployment rate has skyrocketed, and our nation's students score poorly in comparison to other students around the world with thirty percent of them not even finishing high school.