Our First Draft Krewe is one week away from its NOLA house-gutting trip. Everybody who’s on the NOLA list knows this already, because I’ve been pestering them nonstop, but I thought I’d send up a flare to the rest of the Internet. You guys are incredible. I thought at most we’d have three or four people. We have 14, who will be hooking up with local community organizations to gut a house (maybe two), confab with local bloggers who’ve been working this story, and see for ourselves what the situation is on the ground.

In addition to those of you who are going, many of you have hit up the Tip Jar over there to help us pay for expenses or have bought needed equipment — thank you. Thank you for making this possible.

Virgotex (who’s also the authoress of that image up there) asked me, way back when we first started this, if we should have a common theme in our posts about it, if there was some common way to articulate why we were doing this. And it stumped me for a long time, not because it was a complicated answer but because it was a simple one:

I guess my idea of the “why” of the whole thing has always been, we’re doing this because we’ve got to take care of each other. It could be me tomorrow, it could be you, and because of that, we have to do what we can.

Our social safety net, our security, our confidence that America takes care of its own … we have to make those things true for each other because no one else will.

It’s something I hit on a lot in my posts and to people who e-mail me, feeling helpless, the universe is just a fucking cesspool of misery and what can I ever do to combat all of that, it’s too much, it’s too hard, it’ll never work — God, do I ever understand that feeling lately. It’s just so much easier to give up in advance, because everybody’s cynical, everybody understands that thieves get rich and saints get shot, throw up your hands, whatever.

Screw that. If it was me — and it will be, someday, I’m pretty sure, with the current crew of hucksters and fratmen in charge none of us is safe — I would want someone to come. So off we go, a week from today.

All 14 of us, and those of you who’ve thrown in to help, and those of you having us over for crawfish and other food when we get down there, and those of you cheering us on.

A.