If you haven't read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, get a copy right now and do it. I haven't been moved by a book in a long time like I have by this one. The book's been out for almost three years and can be had cheaply from Amazon.

I found myself in the peculiar position of needing to teach the book recently, when I was asked to take a course on an imergency basis with a week of the spring semester already passed at the university where I teach. I had never taught the course before and was thrown into it with someone else's syllabus and reading list. This gave me a little taste of what Ehnrenreich is trying to get across to us in her book.

Writing straight out of the boom years of the late 1990s, she makes a compelling case for the wealth of the nation being built on the bent backs of the working poor. I'm now waiting for her, or someone like her, to do the same for our soldiers and veterans. The military has always been a poor man's army, and the current situation is no different from the past.