I can recall watching the show as a kid and picking up cues about racial tolerance and how bigotry can hurt someone’s feelings. Or giving to others instead of being greedy. What loss feels like after a loved one passes away (YouTube).

Or how it is our differences which make each of us the special person we are…even little furry monsters.

After Katrina, there was an episode where Big Bird lost his nest in a hurricane.  The Sesame Street community came together to help him rebuild. 

For parents and educators? There was a whole curriculum program put together to help teach children to cope with weathering a fierce storm in their own lives.  It was brilliantly done.

So, when I heard that the Children’s Television Workshop had a special in the works on the economy and its impact on families, I had to find a copy to view. 

Above is a promo clip for "Families Stand Together," which aired on most PBS stations nationally on September 9th. If you missed it, you can view the whole episode here.

And you should, because it is wonderful.

As they move from table to table and story to story, Roker and Roberts ask how each family is coping and celebrate their ability to put togetherness before material things. Even so, the series of mini-docs will make an adult viewer swallow hard more than once. Jobs have been lost, and homes, families that were planned on the foundation of a solid-seeming career now teeter, mothers wipe away tears and proud parents find themselves having to ask for help — financial, psychological — from family and local agencies.

Although the emphasis is kept firmly on the importance of love and careful planning, "Families Stand Together" makes it clear that there is no magic wand, no fairy-tale ending in sight. These hard times are real and must be endured, sacrifice is required, and comfort comes not from a sudden windfall but from knowing that many have, and are, going through the same sort of thing.

This is the way to convey not only a sense of compassion and caring, but also to foster a sense of community that is sorely needed as so many folks struggle to get by.

dday recently examined the new census data, and it is absolutely devastating:

The U.S. Census Bureau has just announced that the poverty rate for 2008 was 13.2%. This means the number of people in poverty has increased by about 2.5 million, to 39.8 million. To give you some perspective, 2.5 million is more than the number of people who live in Detroit and San Francisco combined.

The only way that any of this gets better is if we all pull together and help each other through it. Poverty is an issue that needs broader discussion, especially as more and more families with children are forced to tighten their belts even further. (more…)

Gathering of loons via Steve took it.

Continuing to open yap and insert ass, the random wingnutty Obama school speech idiocy continues:

After reading the text on Monday, even Jim Greer, the Florida Republican Party chairman who last week accused the president of seeking to use the speech to foist “socialist ideology” on schoolchildren, said he could find nothing to criticize in its text.

"In its current form, it’s fine,” Mr. Greer said in an interview. “But it remains to be seen if it’s the speech he’s going to give.”

Because you can never be too careful about that hide the socialist ideology published in advance speech bait and switch maneuver, now can you? It is to laugh.

The speech?  It’s terrifying stuff alright:

What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

How dare the President of the United States tell our nation’s children to dream big and dare to solve our most pressing problems. The nerve.

What’s not funny about all of this? The amount of ink and airtime that’s been devoted to a false, ginned-up hissy fit when real, substantial problems for our nation’s children and teachers are sitting out there getting barely any notice. (more…)

Poignant moment via Jake Parrish. Lovely shot.

As a nation, we are failing the most vulnerable members of our society.

The number of homeless schoolchildren, uprooted amidst the financial turmoil of the last few years is rising:

There were 679,000 homeless students reported in 2006-7, a total that surpassed one million by last spring, Ms. Duffield said.

With schools just returning to session, initial reports point to further rises. In San Antonio, for example, the district has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school, twice as many as at the same point last year.

Between foreclosures, job losses and catastrophic illness costs, it’s not just the very poor who are feeling the pinch. The middle class is hurting, too, as families who never had to ask for assistance in the past suddenly depend on it just to get by from week to week.

These days? We’re all a paycheck away from disaster, it seems.

And the elderly? New analysis shows that the poverty rate among those over 65 is far worse than previously thought:

Nearly 20% of Americans over 65 would be considered poor if the government updates the way it calculates poverty, which hasn’t considered medical costs, regional variations and other factors since its creation in 1955.

Currently, the poverty rate for that age group is 9.7%, or 3.6 million people. If the government adopts a revised formula by the National Academy of Sciences, that figure would jump to 18.6% — 6.8 million people…

Recently, a United Way group in Illinois tried to give its volunteers a glimpse into life for the "other half." The lessons learned were some hard ones:

Participants were separated into six different low-income family types and assigned a role to play under various situations, including being newly unemployed, a new applicant for government assistance or a part-time employee relying on food stamps.

Families had to keep their home secure, pay their bills, feed their families and keep the utilities on for a month using various income and debt scenarios. Services such as an employment office, pawn shop, banker, food pantry and grocery store were available. To reach them, though, every person had to use a $2 transportation voucher, which grew scarce as money ran low.

If you have never had to face unexpected poverty, or didn’t grow up around it as a child, then these situations might sound dire. For folks who have lived barely scraping by? It sounds like a whole lot of life.

Certainly personal responsibility plays a big role: bad choices make for bad results for a lot of folks. But for young kids who didn’t choose the families into which they were born? Or for the elderly who have seen retirement savings shrink over the past few years while prescription doughnut holes have expanded?

Who wants to tell their grandma the fact she has to choose between her medicine and food is her own damned fault and to stop whining about prescription drug profit margins. (more…)

I couldn’t help thinking about all those kids in America for whom the start of school means something else entirely: two meals every weekday. How tough would it be to be that young and already have learned that lesson?

Today’s quote comes from Robert Coram: …it is here where wealthy and dignified mortals roll along the streets in all the parade and trappings of royalty, while the lower class are not half so well fed as the horses of the former.

Why is it in this country that it feels like we continually back people into a corner. Sometimes of our own making, sometimes of theirs, but oft times a combination of both. And then we bitch about them being in that damned corner. But we never really bother contemplating how they got there in the first place.

It’s been a long, lean summer for children in poverty already. Without the free breakfast and lunch of the school year, a lot of these kids scramble to scrape together one meal a day. And, as the recession deepens for a lot of folks? It’s getting worse for these kids and their desperately poor families.

Which one of these things is not like the others?

Example #1: The Illinois governor’s budget proposal would scale back home visits to ill-equipped first-time mothers, who are given advice over 18 months that experts say is repaid many times over in reduced child abuse and better school preparation. “We spend $1.2 billion a year on child welfare,” said Diana M. Rauner, director of the Ounce of Prevention Fund in Chicago, which channels government money to private agencies. “You’d think we’d spend a lot of money to keep people out of that system.”