On December 19, 2005 Mayor Gavin Newsom gave his second annual state of homelessness address-to another room packed with of lots of people paid to be there.

His speech was rosy, charmingly self-deprecating, and filled with mind-boggling statistics on how wonderful the city is doing. For many urban mayors, homelessness is a seemingly intractable problem if you are only one little city in a huge country bent on messing poor people over. But not our Gavin. He’s Bob the Builder: Can we build it? Yes we can! No really, we don’t mean to poke fun… well, yes we do.

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A couple of days after Christmas a woman, who was a registered nurse and a homeless resident of Next Door Shelter, sent an email to STREET SHEET / Coalition on Homelessness requesting some help raising money to purchase medical supplies for the shelter. Next Door, on the corner of Geary and Polk Streets, is one of the city’s big shelters.

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Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were unprecedented: destroying or nearly destroying a number of American cities and towns, displacing hundreds of thousands, revealing the utter lack of preparation of government, and even—if only for a brief moment—putting the issue of homelessness and poverty on the political map. As we witnessed the tremendous public response, we felt a guarded, tenuous hope that the generosity and swift action of the public and private sectors might also translate into a new will to end homelessness for all Americans.

Indeed, the response to Hurricane Katrina gave us more reason to believe that homelessness could be ended—shelters emptied, housing located, services provided, goods donated, hearts opened. No more, it seemed, would the phrase “ending homelessness” be bandied about as an empty slogan or a lofty but unreachable goal—in many communities, for many evacuees, it was meaningful and achievable.

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It certainly wasn’t Rep. John Murtha’s (D-PA) nonetheless startling reversal on the Iraqi War that turned the tide for the peace movement. Nor was it the irritating Jenny-Come-Lately claims of leadership for the peace movement by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who sat like the Mugwump she is for the last three years and said nothing about Iraq.

Rather, it was a Gold Star Mother—a grieving mother from Vacaville turned activist—who re-energized the peace movement. And with only one question: “Why? Why did my son Casey die?”

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Early Monday morning at work, at Lamar’s Creole Style Buffalo Wings in New Orleans, La., the day seems normal. I’ve just set up my steam tables, washed the dishes, finished up counting the money in the cash register, and I’m ready to roll.

Staring out of a cardboard box-sized window after a customer leaves… suddenly rain drops taps on the window seal. Oh my God I thought to myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced the good ole New Orleans rain. Then Boom, and Ka-bang… thunder and lighting hit. I did not know what to do, the rain continued to pour, and pour.

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