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In some ways, this blog has been hiding its light under the bush for too long. I need to explain the political and emotional drivers of my connection to the Gulf Coast, and why I won't stop writing about it any time soon.

The most powerful relationships in my life have been characterized by this type of convergence. My first great love and I covered the violence in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, for our college newspaper. Little did we know that we would be witnessing (and participating in) the last march Martin Luther King, Jr., would lead before his assassination. After his death, we coauthored an op-ed called "The Violent Death of Non-Violence," still one of my favorites among the many hundreds of piecesd I have written alone or with others throughout my career.

My second great love and I were writing partners on some investigative environmental stories, particularly the tragedy of Los Afectados, thousands of Central American banana workers rendered sterile by exposure to a pesticide supplied by U.S. companies after it had been banned in the U.S. for causing manufacturing workers here to become sterile.

Most of my work has involved the attempt to balance accurate, professional journalistic standards with my own social conscience. It has also often been one way I have grown more connected with my partners. When my girlfriend returned from her first, short stint in Mississippi last October, I was deeply affected by the stories she told me of the suffering she'd witnessed there.

After she returned to the south a month later, I visited to see for myself. The very first afternoon she drove me through East Biloxi, I was stunned; I've not been able to get the images out of my mind ever since. It is difficult to adequately describe a devastation so extensive that experts say it will require twelve long years of hard effort to rebuild that community.

Her passion for the area and the plight of Katrina's victims has rekindled my own. We share a deep anger at the injustices of race and class so visibly on display since the hurricane ripped the facade of classlessness in America to shreds. Today -- as we were fond of saying in the '60s, "You're either part of the problem, or you're part of the solution."

If there is any solution to be found for such large issues, it is educating ourselves and our fellow citizens about our fundamental responsibility to collectively restructure the way our society creates and sustains poverty amidst the greatest concentration of wealth known to history.

She and I have drafted our first article together about this subject, to be published by a national outlet in the upcoming weeks. When it does, of course, I'll link to the site. For me, naturally, there are personal aspects of this new partnering that are bittersweet. Though we are no longer able to be together, we are just now finding our mutual voice, much as I have done with the other great loves in my life.

It takes two. Thank you, Freebird.