My mind has turned to mush. Perhaps it’s because, when I’m not sweating, I’m sneezing. Oh, who am I kidding? I’m always sweating…and sneezing. I wonder why I care so much about nature when it clearly has nothing but contempt for me. I also wonder what I ever liked about summer.

I can’t blame it all on nature, though. There’s something else. A couple of weeks ago, I had dinner with an old friend I hadn’t seen in almost 20 years. She said she had no hope for the world. She wasn’t depressed. She’d just gotten to the point where she couldn’t see a way out of the mess we’ve created for ourselves. I told her I was still optimistic about the future. I guess I’ve been trying to figure out why ever since.

As it happens, I attended the Save Our State Teach-In in Harrisburg the day after reuniting with my friend. In the space of three hours, we heard about devastating budget cut after devastating budget cut. Addiction programs are losing money just as we open casinos in Pennsylvania. The DEP is losing money just as Marcellus Shale ramps up. We’re cutting money for schools and libraries even though we say education is the key to our future. Those are but a few of the budget crises we heard about that day. Something about it reminded me of my last CS2 column. In it, I tried to make the point that we’ve heard the Marcellus Shale story before. It was called the PG&E story. Before that, it was called the Love Canal story. In fact, at any given moment the story is being retold as the sewage sludge fertilizer story or the Richmond Quarry story or the BP story. That day in Harrisburg, we were just hearing many variations of another story—the story of the seemingly bottomless need for resources to care for our own, for our environment, and for our future.

A couple of months ago, I added a Jobs page to the Berks Progress site. I found several links to job listings in the non-profit sector for activists and organizers. As I perused the listings, I realized that nothing I work on was represented in those ads—that the ads were taken up with a multitude of other needs. I checked the IRS website. As of 2008, there were 1,536,135 non-profit organizations in the United States. That list doesn’t include governmental commissions and boards. It doesn’t cover private fundraising activities for individuals in need. It doesn’t cover some of the charitable work done by religious institutions or schools. Malcolm Gladwell discussed the mega-church phenomenon in a New Yorker piece in 2005. He cited work done by Ram Cnaan, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, to determine the replacement value of the time, money, and resources put into charitable work done by congregations. He found that it came to about $140,000 per congregation. Multiply that by the number of congregations in Philadelphia and the replacement value for charitable work in that one city alone is $250 million. For all of that work being done, for all of that effort being expended, I sat in Harrisburg and heard story after story of bottomless need. How can that be? And what can we do about it?

At a recent Berks Progress meeting, I spoke about the many different hats worn by those in attendance. One of the challenges for our group is differentiating Berks Progress from so many of the other efforts we’re involved in individually. We’ve been fortunate to attract the most active, most engaged, and most committed Progressives in Berks County to our group, but that means that there are a lot of hats in the room. If we are to represent something new and different to the Progressive movement in Berks County, we need to leave our other affiliations at the door and discuss only that which is unique to our group. That doesn’t mean that we need to navigate some meaningless middle ground where we can all agree. That’s the job of the Democratic Party, I’m afraid. For Progressives, it means getting to the heart of the matter. We don’t have a multitude of problems in this country. We have three problems: military spending, the role of the corporation in our lives, and the environment. If we go after those problems, if we solve those problems, we will have solved most of our other problems.

Representative Barney Frank put forward a proposal that was incredibly gutsy by modern Congressional standards. He suggested that we cut military spending by 25%. His proposal spawned an organization calling itself the 25% Solution that gained lots of momentum in Massachusetts, Frank’s home state, and is now making its way into other parts of the country. The group points to changes that could be made without compromising our security, like ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, reducing active nuclear warheads, cutting the F-22 and other unnecessary weapons systems, and closing half of the 800 military bases outside the United States. If we made those changes, we’d save $175 billion annually. That money would go a long way toward addressing those seemingly bottomless needs. (For much more on the 25% Solution, visit their site at www.25percentsolution.com.)

The 25% Solution is one of many organizations participating in the One Nation march in Washington on October 2nd. No, you’re not the only one who noticed that the Obama administration has not delivered on its campaign promises, something about “change we could believe in”  I think. One Nation seeks to restore the American Dream by demanding the changes we voted for.

I don’t know if I’ve figured out why I’m still optimistic. Perhaps it’s simply my nature—or my disorder. Or perhaps it’s because it’s good to know that there are millions of Americans dedicated to non-profit and charitable causes and because it’s inspiring to be in the company of the folks I have the pleasure of working with on the issues that mean the most to me. If you want to be part of the Progressive movement in Berks, please join us at the next Berks Progress meeting at 6 p.m. on August 11th at the Peanut Bar in Reading. For more information, visit www.berksprogress.org or search Berks Progress on Facebook.